I’ve been lusting after a Livid Instruments CNTRL:R for awhile now and some poking around on their website shows that every button/knob/slider can be programmed to pretty much anything. Correct me if I’m wrong but wouldn’t this be perfect for the Octatrack? 8 faders, enough knobs to provide hours of tweaking, 16 pads in a line…?
it works with banks/channel groupings. this means not every control element can be freely assigned, which always put me off.
i feel it should have less programming limitations at that price.
only the encoders are fully mappable, the rest of the control elements can be mapped by CC number but not by MIDI channel, instead you get “banks”, which allow you to group elements to MIDI channels. not how i like to work.
That’s kinda silly. I’ve used more than a few devices that are powered over USB and that have both MIDI-over-USB and good ol” vanilla 5-pin DIN MIDI sockets, but none of them require a connection to a computer in order to function; they’ll run happily with power over USB only using for example a mobile phone charger.
I can’t think of a reason why they did this. Are you sure this limitation still exists?
I spent about a month looking into various controllers and checking the midi specs vs the OT midi specs. I ended up getting the Quneo controller. It’s pretty mind blowing what you can do with it and it’s taken the OT to the next level for me.
It’s USB only on the Quneo itself, but they make a little $45 MIDI 5 pin in/out box for it too.
It’s not going to be ideal for everyone, but you should really check it out. Plus, used ones go for pretty cheap!
Can only recommend BCR2000 or iPad+touchOsc(or similar app).
Faderfox has a brand new one that looks decent too.
If you like faders, octakontrol.
Bitstream if you find a working one.
Not many contenders actually.
I never buy usb only controllers (no dongly stuff either). Ever. Din5 FTW.
Ok. CTRL R now has Renegade Mode for standalone operation. The unit needs to be powered by a typical USB phone charger when used like this…and I read on the forums that the LEDs were only responding to midi feedback when connected to a computer via USB.
Just waiting for confirmation from support that this has been fixed…
MIDI feedback by definition needs a midi signal sent to the device. I imagine the ot is not designed to send midi feedback like that. So I wouldn’t say the Livid controllers (or any other) need to be ‘fixed’.
However, you can, in the livid editor, change how the leds behave. You really can customise almost everything on their controllers - whether pads send notes, cc, what value, how the behave - though yes, yer likely restricted to one channel at a time.
I really dont know another controller that allows you to customise how it behaves so deeply.
[table][tr][td]You are correct, currently in renegade mode, the LEDs are only controlled by local control. The input from the MIDI jack does not update the LED state.
We are planning to add this feature into the next update for CNTRL:R! This will be in the next couple of months.[/td]
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