Hello - first post! Not sure if this should be going in the Tool discussion…
Just wondering what those hardware users are using to manage their midi workflow?
I’ve been in using Ctrlr in other daws and it’s generally very good, if a little unstable. Then on diving into Renoise I discovered Guru which seems very well thought out, stable and benefits from the PDC which as far as I know Ctrlr in Renoise doesn’t. I also realise that it hasn’t been updated for a while (2012?). Does that imply that users have moved to something else (Ctrlr)?
Interested to hear what others are using and in what way…
Guru is amazing and quite easy to program - I made the DX7, TX81Z and A-Station patches. Its great for editing patches and recalling them, but you cant automate anything unfortunately. Not sure its being updated at all...but Id still make patches for it if I had a new midi synth.
Ctrl looks cool, and supports lots of synths…but having the programmer in house(daw) suits me better
Nice videos and sounds. I’ve got a TX81 so look forward to trying out the patch. I really think the Lua implementation in Renoise is cool - other daws should take note, lots of potential.
So, I know the device can be midi mapped, although I had a funny instance the other night when the slider when beyond the ui display min/max values - Lua console threw an error and the patch had to be reloaded - is there a way to scale the incoming slider cc val to keep within a range or stop the patch crapping out?
Also, would you just use the Instr MIDI Control to ‘automate’ the synths instead of mapping the controller to the device?
I just did a modified version of the Ctrlr TX81z penal last month (pm me if you want it).
Being a good platform it still lacks preset management, and keeps crushing Renoise on my MAC…
I now host it with Plogue Bidule and save patches as .fxp.
btw the midi processor on 81z is a bit slow, usual controller message is okey but sysex parameters are impossible to be automated smoothly.
EDIT: for those who experience Ctrlr - Renoise crashes under OSX 10.6, try host it inside Bidule,
My workaround is starting Renoise with an “initialize” template song with a Bidule VST instance wrapping Ctrlr, and then start a new song or open a project normally, after that “initializing” act Ctrlr will behave much more stable.
I think both Guru and the older “Sysex librarian” tool are discontinued and not working with 3.0, at least not working here. Such a shame, they really helped with the workflow.
In fact, I honestly consider such functionality so important for hardware users that I feel the Renoise team should start working on a native solution for this / take over the Guru development. As long as the basic engine is there, its up to us users to add synth definitiions anyway.
I think both Guru and the older “Sysex librarian” tool are discontinued and not working with 3.0, at least not working here. Such a shame, they really helped with the workflow.
In fact, I honestly consider such functionality so important for hardware users that I feel the Renoise team should start working on a native solution for this / take over the Guru development. As long as the basic engine is there, its up to us users to add synth definitiions anyway.
That’s strange, Guru seems to be working fine for me on latest 3.01. What was on the road map to improve to it?
Hm ok, maybe I should try again. I’m running Renoise 3.0 now actually (64-bit), maybe the newest build handles things differently.
I don’t know about any roadmap improvements though, I guess searching the forums could give some answers!
Hm ok, maybe I should try again. I’m running Renoise 3.0 now actually (64-bit), maybe the newest build handles things differently.
I don’t know about any roadmap improvements though, I guess searching the forums could give some answers!
Yeah it updated it to latest when it installed, but I haven’t noticed anything weird…
Guru still seems fine in 3.1 beta. It does the auto-update thing and the MKS-70 panel seems to work (didn’t test extensively). SysEx Librarian doesn’t (not for me anyway), sort of a shame but there are so many non-Renoise sysex tools out there I don’t think I’ll miss it. Still, would be cool if someone took up the mantle. I’m working on a series of Jesusonic plugins that might lead into me doing a Renoise sysex/synth controller tool myself (depending how I do with Lua, I’m a rank amateur coder)
Glad I saw this thread, reminded me to try out Ctrlr (MKS-70 panel) in Renoise, I’ll write more later whether it works well or not (or at all). Ctrlr is preferable to Guru because it’s much easier to automate (to automate Guru you have to do some Bidule trickery etc and it doesn’t work particularly well) and seeme quite stable as long as the panel is properly coded. Also it’s like the Guru panel in that it has in-interface MIDI routing directly out of the host (rather than through the host) so you can access the MIDI out to the synth directly and not worry about Renoise routing at all, should work fine
I now use Ctrlr extensively with hardware (TX81z and Korg R3), if set-up correctly you can really use hardwares just like plug-ins comfortably; as said above Ctrlr can directly route to midi drivers by itself, what you can do next is putting a Line-in Device at the sampler fx chain of the same instrument, combined it’s a complete midi > hardware > line-in path under one instrument slot.
hlrf, have you found any problems with Ctrlr in Renoise? I’m trying it now and once I got the routing sorted it seems to be fine. The only problem is that parameters you can automate don’t “advertise” properly – they only show up in the Inst. Automation device on a track as “undefined_0” thru “undefined_64”. In Reaper they advertise by name. Will see if I can figure out the problem, if not it’ll be really difficult to automate it. Other plugins don’t appear to have that problem, all parameters are named properly, so it’s probably a Ctrlr issue. Sort of too bad we can’t use the “Output to plugin host” option in Ctrlr
Well I can’t help much with plugin parameters, don’t use that in my panels. Firstly the Korg R3 is well mapped with midi cc’s and TX81z is too old to take any live tweaking, so I never bothered with plugin automation.
With my panels they showed up as “undefined_n” as well, but value mappings are correct. I suggest you take a look at Protoplug, which is also JUCE based, that one’s parameter naming shows up fine under Renoise.
Yeah, I’m actually working on a Jesusonic (ReaPlugs) controller that hopefully I can make into a VSTi. Another problem Ctrlr seems to have in Renoise is that when I send patch data from the MKS-70 to Ctrlr, it somehow spits a bunch of data back at the MKS-70 and messes with random settings – this is even when I’ve got sysex/apr/ipr receive turned off on the MKS…?!? …and have made sure there is no MIDI looping going on. Weird. Doesn’t do that in Reaper. Have a feeling this panel needs some work after all, but it’s 100% fine in Reaper. Might generate a bug report but I want to be sure I’m not just screwing something up.
I wasn’t at Svalbard to witness the total eclipse though, but at least we followed the live stream in the office