Melbourne Instruments Roto Control

MirrorProfiles

MirrorProfiles

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That is cool, but also seems like a pretty impractical tool? A good chunk of what it does could be done with just a display that shows values.

At 469 € incl VAT it is not too badly priced. I like that it has probably Cherry MX compatible key switches which feel nice to press and switching between settings is easy.

For using this with guitar products, it would likely have to be limited to VST plugins, and even then it's going to be a mixed bag depending on what they support as shown in the video where one plugin would not report its state.

Hardware modelers are all abysmally bad for MIDI mapping where they won't communicate the mapped parameters between preset changes. E.g send MIDI CC values to say "this mapped preset parameter assigned to MIDI ch 1 CC 3 changed to value 43". they tend to discard mapping if you change presets, don't support relative values, have limited mappable parameters etc.

Fx pedals are often no better. While they might allow every parameter to be controlled via MIDI, they also don't report back their state between preset changes.
 
laxu said:
also seems like a pretty impractical tool? A good chunk of what it does could be done with just a display that shows values.
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IMO the main appeal is that you can control things without needing another display, especially when you might not remember the exact mapping (like on software that has more controls than there are available knobs). When controlling different software with different mapping, having the displays for each knob and button is massively appealing.
laxu said:
For using this with guitar products, it would likely have to be limited to VST plugins, and even then it's going to be a mixed bag depending on what they support as shown in the video where one plugin would not report its state.
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Plugin control is a given, and I think any hardware should be able to support it. It’s something the synth and music production world seems to take more seriously than guitar products, unfortunately.

I’ve never had an issue with plugins not displaying their state when using a midi controller? Mapping controls and names is a pretty generic feature for each DAW and I’d imagine it’s quite straightforward.

The motorized knobs seem a bit of a novelty to me, but I think the haptic feedback stuff for switching to rotary encoders would be nice - for instance changing between subdivisions on a delay.

I’ve done a fair bit of MIDI control with the Behringer X Touch, and I think this offers quite a lot of advantages even if I’m not a regular Ableton user. The price seems good too. Hopefully they do some kind of rack kit, I’d quite like having the cables hidden away.
 
MirrorProfiles said:
I’ve never had an issue with plugins not displaying their state when using a midi controller? Mapping controls and names is a pretty generic feature for each DAW and I’d imagine it’s quite straightforward.
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See the "Software" section in the video I linked at about 18:46. It shows how Komplete Kontrol doesn't work right with the controller. The motorized knobs don't track, and he needs to cycle between sets of parameters up top that can match the parameters on the controller, but the right labels don't show up etc.

This is the major issue with any MIDI controller, where they often don't get the state of the thing they are controlling back from the software or device. You can obviously still control stuff, but turning a knob will set the value in the controlled thing to where that knob was pointing, rather than e.g preset value etc.

Until MIDI 2.0 becomes more prominent, this is most likely a hurdle. And considering how slow the adoption of MIDI 2.0 is, it could be ages until that happens.

Support for relative CC values (<64 for down, >64 for up) on the device or plugin end solves this in an elegant way because the MIDI controller no longer needs to know its state. It simply sends "value up/down" messages that the controlled device or software interprets as "turn this param's value up/down". Now all you need is the ability to see those values, probably on the device's display or a plugin window. Infinite rotaries are of course necessary for this.
 
laxu said:
See the "Software" section in the video I linked at about 18:46. It shows how Komplete Kontrol doesn't work right with the controller. The motorized knobs don't track, and he needs to cycle between sets of parameters up top that can match the parameters on the controller, but the right labels don't show up etc.

This is the major issue with any MIDI controller, where they often don't get the state of the thing they are controlling back from the software or device. You can obviously still control stuff, but turning a knob will set the value in the controlled thing to where that knob was pointing, rather than e.g preset value etc.

Until MIDI 2.0 becomes more prominent, this is most likely a hurdle. And considering how slow the adoption of MIDI 2.0 is, it could be ages until that happens.

Support for relative CC values (<64 for down, >64 for up) on the device or plugin end solves this in an elegant way because the MIDI controller no longer needs to know its state. It simply sends "value up/down" messages that the controlled device or software interprets as "turn this param's value up/down". Now all you need is the ability to see those values, probably on the device's display or a plugin window. Infinite rotaries are of course necessary for this.
Click to expand...
Isn’t that more on Komplete Control? The stuff around 11 minutes seems fine and how I’d expect it all to work (and much like how MIDI control things behave with my X-Touch mini)
 
MirrorProfiles said:
Isn’t that more on Komplete Control? The stuff around 11 minutes seems fine and how I’d expect it all to work (and much like how MIDI control things behave with my X-Touch mini)
Click to expand...
Yes, but just goes to show that compatibility is not a guaranteed thing.
 
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