That sounds super interesting. So plocking video? Is that a thing? Would love to see this.
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This sounds really rad. Can we trouble you for a video on how youāve worked this out? Octatrack controlling visualizations sounds like a dream.
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Just a couple weeks ago I was driving myself insane saying āis it not possible to record a neighbor track?! I have T3 as a neighbor track, and T4 set up to record T3 but no audio is being recorded! What the hell?ā
Turns out when I manually recorded (instead of grid/step recording) I pressed T3 + Input ABā¦Whoops.
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program changes work from the DT and DN to each other with program change send and received set to Auto in both. Theres no creative benefit imo to making hardware more difficult.
As @Schnork already tried to explain: this AUTO setting doesnāt mean automatic, but refers to the AUTO channel. It only works when the AUTO channel is also configured to the same channel number on both devices. There is no hidden communication going on between the two devices.
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There is really nothing on the simpler Elektrons (DT, DN, M:S and M:C) which could be viewed as āmaking hardware more difficultā imho and the complex architecture of the bigger boxes is merely a consequence of their enormous flexibility.
There are only 16 midi channels per midi port, 128 midi notes, 128 midi cc messages and 128 programs in 128 banks. There is midi clock, start/stop/restart messages. (Some parameters on Elektrons can be controlled with NRPN, but mostly thatās all we have to deal with).
Thatās quite simple frankly and the midi side on Elektron gear is not their work. All manufacturers have to implement midi according to official midi specifications.
Iām not trying to be a dick, but Elektron gear is really pretty straight-forwardā¦
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Itāll be a while before I have things at the point where i can put a video together about it but I do plan on doing that. As of now Iām not using the Octatrack for visuals at all, just for live looping audio, but Iām hoping to find a way to work it in to the video side of things.
Iām hoping that using trigless trigs to trigger an LFO in hold or trig mode will do what I want without locking up r_e_c_u_r but I havenāt had a chance to try it yet.
Sort of, Iāve been using MIDI CC to change the playback location in long videos, basically using them kind of like sample chains in the Octatrack. Pretty basic stuff if youāre using a laptop or desktop based system but I try to avoid computers on the performance side of things, and using single-purpose Rapsberry Pis with no monitors (other than a small, text mode display on the one that Iām using for video playback) makes them feel like dedicated hardware even though theyāre technically general purpose computers.
Iāve been doing some music-and-video livestreams with a sort of space-rock duo but for now Iām not really sharing them around much since weāre still figuring out a lot of stuff. If you want to check out what weāve done so far there are VODs here and we stream at 2:30 EST every Tuesday right now. Over the next couple weeks Iām going to switch to 720p with thumbnails of live cameras in the margin, just waiting on a cheap HDMI capture dongle and we have to work out what service to use for his video feed (all of the music is done remotely - heās in France and Iām in the USA) and work out the amount of latency compensation so his camera stays roughly in sync with his audio (approximate network latency plus the Ninjam loop interval). That plus I need to get a second Nanokontrol and build a couple things before my video setup will really be where I want it for the time being.
When all of thatās done Iāll start making some prepared content.
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I made this 10 years ago, controlled by an MC 909, midi controlling Archaos VJ and lights.
Mapping made with After Fx from photos.
Wanted to add a midi guitar control but it didnāt work for the live.
So now I want to do it with OT! A Raspberry instead of Windows PC, yes.
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Wasnt trying to argue or disagree, but pointing out that sending PC messages between Digi machines works with channels set to auto. Thats it. It works in those machines and doesnt in the OT.
I may have misunderstood @schnork, but I thought they were saying that its not possible and that theres a creative benefit to difficult workflows.
Thatās because choosing AUTO for this setting in the OT doesnāt mean āuse the AUTO CHANNELā like on the DN & DT, but (from the OT manual):
If AUTO is chosen the first MIDI channel used by the audio tracks, and not used by any of the MIDI tracks, will be used.
Naming this option also AUTO (like in AUTO CHANNEL) is, of course, very misleading when you donāt check the manual what it means regarding this setting.
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indeed! esp when it apparently means something else in other elektron devices!
but also makes no difference once you know. ha its like everything on the OT does make sense - it just defines its own internal rules and logic unlike any other.
thanks
Nice. Yeah, itās a tradeoff - you can do a LOT more with a PC, even with free software, but thereās a small but vibrant RPi video synthesis ecosystem growing and they have the advantage of being small, affordable and once you have things set up they definitely feel more like dedicated hardware.
I do plenty of stuff ITB for audio and video but on the performance side (whether itās playing live/streaming, or just recording an overdub) I try to engage with computers as little as possible, simply because I feel like I work better that way. The way my home studio is set up I pretty much have to keep my back to the DAW when Iām playing an instrument.
If youāre interested in live video on the RPi you should absolutely check out https://andreijaycreativecoding.com/ - his stuff is really good, very reliable, and the turnkey systs he offers ae actually really fairly if you donāt want to DIY (I already had half the stuff I needed so Iāve only done the DIY route so far). They seem a little expensive for a Raspberry Pi until you actually look at the price of the video capture pi hats he uses. When you add everything up, including the custom enclosure, heās selling them pretty close to cost, but itās all open source so if you want to make your own itās definitely possible and not too hard. Iāve been using auto_waaave inside of a feedback loop (Iāve got the monitor out from one mixer going to an input of a second mixer, and then that mixerās output going to the auto_waaave and from there back to an input on the first mixer, so I can have feedback inside of feedback, and a bunch of other things) and Iām working on building a spectral_mesh but I still need to get a controller for it and figure out how to best integrate it into the setup since Iām out of mixer inputs.
EDIT: just to be clear, r_e_c_u_r works really well, too. The stability problems I have are because Iām completely misusing it and everything I do is based on a feature that was added quickly by a comunity member because I suggested it. Basically itās not designed for anything like the kind of MIDI control Iām doing and itās really easy to flood it with data, but sing it the way itās meant to be used itās really effective and reliable in my experience. A bit more DIY heavy than the Andrei Jay stuff but very good. Iām also in a sort of a bind with it because I canāt easily update, since the dev version changed the numpad handling code a fair amount and I modified it in the version I use so that it will work with a larger keypad than it was designed for, but because of the changes I canāt just update and then drop my code back in easily. Eventually Iāll go through the trouble (or just switch to a smaller keypad) because the latest dev version has options for mapping MIDI notes to control values in ways that the release version canāt and that would be a big improvement for my purposes.
Anyway, before I discovered r_e_c_u_r I was looking at othe rPI based video players, mostly aimed at gallery installations, and they were all really expensive (the cheapest one is an LZX turnkey thing thatās, and the only other viable option I found was technically open source but hadnāt been updated in so long that half of the LARGE number of dependencies you need to compile it arenāt available anymore, there is no precompiled image available, and the developer wants $100 for a preconfigured SD card or $500-$800 for a Pi3 with an SD card and custom case and seems to actively discourage people from building and sharing even though it was released as open source). In both cases, r_e_c_u_r does exponentially more and all you need to do to get it running is burn an image, get a suitable screen and keypad, and edit a few config files.
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Told you!
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I love this idea. Nice vids too. 
Keep up the work!
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Thanks.
I didnāt have a chance to do any more with the OT today (it ended up taking FOREVER to figure out a weird sync problem between my capture card and an upscaler I just installed today - for some reason it doesnāt capture HD analog video correctly unless I set it to capture RGBHV but send it RGBC - if I actually send it RGBHV when itās set to capture RGBHV the picture is unstable, and if I set it to capture RGBC when Iām sending it RGBC I only get the green channel, but mismatching them works perfectly and I tried just about every possible solution a few times before I stumbled on that), but Iām pretty confident the solution to my problems with the OT controlling r_e_c_u_r will be to lay out a bunch of empty trigless locks in advance and then convert them to trigless trigs on the fly (because in performance itās slightly fewer button presses to do it that way than to add a trig and convert it), with an LFO set to HOLD controlling the playback location. So any time I want to add a randomized jump to a sequence I can convert the relevant step from a trigless lock to a trigless trig, I can convert it back to a trigless lock to clear it, and if I want to send a fixed value all I have to do is plock it on one of the existing trigless locks. Hopefully if Iām not sending any notes at all I wonāt flood the MIDI buffer in r_e_c_u_r, since itās not about total quantity so muc as itās about how close together any two messages are recieved.
Anyhow, thatās enough off-topic for this thread.
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You totally did! thanks for the tip!!
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I see this thread every day. Have you been convinced yet?
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As someone who is still very much an OT novice (purchased in March) I found something that has helped me quite a lot so far is removing it from my setup and using it to create a whole track on its own.
Of course a big reason a lot of people buy one is because of how it will fit into their setup and how it plays with other gear. However thereās a lot of value in just sitting down with only the OT in front of you and allowing yourself the time to understand its workflow as an individual instrument.
Maybe this is quite a basic point to make but I feel a lot of people probably put it straight into their existing setups and then perhaps get a bit lost and frustrated this way. I definitely did this, and Iām getting on a fair bit better by having the odd Octa only session, even if nothing comes of it musically I feel like Iām understanding it more. Learning something new is often just as gratifying as creating something new.
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ā¦yesā¦itās always a wise decision to find out about the deep ones, like ot and a4, separated from everything else, stand alone, for the first period of timeā¦
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