Buttons and knobs behaves strange with Midi in

Something really weird happened while trying to program sets in the arranger yesterday.
Suddenly the knobs and button on the Octatrack stopped responding while in arranger mode. Some buttons did not do anything when pressed, and the knobs did not change the values. When pressing function + turning a knob it did not change the value in real time, but upon releasing the function key it jumped to that value. And when pressing buttons which should react to a certain parameter, it did nothing, but when pressing a totally different knob it changed that value. It was like the Midi in changed the knobs/buttons location internally…
After turning on and off the unit, it worked better once again.

But the behavior then continued when I had closed arranger mode and went into the midi page once again. When trying to change the midi channel of the active track it did not respond to knob turning. But when pressing function + value knob it jumped to a random midi channel upon releasing…

Not sure what is happening to be honest. Has anyone else experienced similar behavior? Is the Octatrack supposed to work differently (its knobs and buttons) while having the midi mode activated while in arranger mode? Should it even be possible to change which knobs react to which parameters via midi (under the hood so to speak). It may be that some of my gear sent it unwanted midi information, but since it has been working well until now I really don’t know what it could be. I have turned of all “receive midi” functions on the Octatrack just to see if it worked, but didn’t seem to do anything…

Do you send notes, Control Changes, Pitch Bend, midi clock ?

If you send too much midi data it can be messy.

Try after setting all channels to off, including Autochannel.
Menu Project > Midi > Channels

Activate CC Direct Connect to disable Midi Mode Control Changes.
Menu Project > Control > Midi Sequencer

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To my knowledge I’m not sending it a lot of midi information. Just have a FCB 1010 and Roland JD-XA connected in serial chain connected to the MIDI In. And the JD-XA is slaved to the Octa and is only used to input notes to the Octa. I will try your suggestions and get back to you. Thanks for your answer.

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I’ve recently had something similar, whilst the sequencer was running I laid down some trigs and p-locks but they never registered and when I selected a new pattern and then returned to the original, the trigs and p-locks had vanished.

Whats really odd is that I have NO midi going into the Octa, only midi out. :confused:

If the JD-XA is connected to both the in and out it’s very likely you have a MIDI feedback loop going. I’ve had similar issues over the years with different setups and it was always a feedback loop in the end. They can be easy to miss. Make sure hat none of the data the OT sends to the XA is being sent out again!

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Wow, haven’t thought about it. But now that I think about it, it could actually be it! The thing is, the problem first occurred when I tried to sequence a Pocket Operator from the XAs CV/Gate Out. And I didn’t get it to work at first, so I tried turning on Midi Soft Thru on the XA (usually I have this setting off) to see if it would resolve it. I have experienced that the notes that I play through the XA, and then are being sent back from the Octa, triggers everything twice and thus creates phasing issues. Thanks for your input.

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The first time I got one everything I had was acing normal except one piece of gear that would sometimes (but not always) start changing values by twos or threes when you turned knobs. Took a while to figure out, especially since it was a notoriously buggy piece of gear on its own so I just blamed it for a while.

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Midi feedback loop = too much midi data ! :wink:

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Not just that, it means getting the same data more than once, too.

yeah, you were correct! I was slow on connecting the dots at first. The momentary turning on the midi soft through was to blame in the end…

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It was a bit scary to be honest. Thought I had ruined the OT for a while… But is there a chance that the OTs midi settings have been swapped and saved while behaving like that? Or should it be back to normal after turning the unit on/off?

Should be normal I think. I guess it’s possible if there was sysex data being fed back that some setting could have been changed but I doubt it.