Digitakt - OB 2.0 Beta - FL Studio 20.1.1 Build 795

Hi Everyone,

Great thread!

Adding a few thoughts, as I just set up FL Studio and DT last night.

First off, OB and FL worked really well together. In fact I’m really impressed with OB.
As a new DT owner, OB adds a ton of value.
I was recording 8 tracks in no time, and I love the ability to sample from the DAW in the the DT over USB.
Late last night I got the midi input driving Omnisphere, and that was very fun!

On the GUI for DT, I found that I toggled the sync setting from “none” to “clock+transport” quite often.
When I was recording audio I needed it set to clock+transport, and once audio was captured I didn’t want to hear both the recorded audio and the DT so I set it to none.
Maybe there is a smoother way to do that, but this worked fine once I figured it out.

One thing I did that others might be interested is how I automated pattern changes for the DT.
I used patcher to connect a keyboard controller —to—> midi out.
By tuning the values of the keys, I could access one pattern per note.
This made it really easy to plan out the pattern changes for the song.

The highlight of my evening was leaving the DAW to go into another room with headphones and the DT. After tweaking the patterns, I came back to the DAW and recorded it. It just worked first shot… I was so happy!

Although I got it working, is there a better way to send midi program changes from FL Studio?
I know you can use the midi out controller on CH 10, but it’s pretty sloppy to edit the events.
What I really wanted was to say at this song position, use pattern 1, and at this song position use pattern 2, etc.

Best regards,

Gino

That is exactly the method that I came up with. I can’t stand it. It’s just an “It totally feels wrong to do it this way” kind of thing. I’m going to look into Patcher at some point as I think it may get us closer. It’s not MAX/MSP but a few people have made some cool stuff and controller type setups for hardware so simple control changes might be doable and in a way that feels more proper. There are huge midi threads on the IL forum about better midi support and they have been working at it but I’ve not done a proper deep dive in yet.


Jeez it’s too early in the morning. Just re-read you used patcher to do it. I think getting to the event automation can be done via the wrench tool on the midi out plugin itself so no need for patcher to draw it the klunky way. I was sure patcher had some more funky widgets where you can basically add dials and there is controller where you can input formulas for example. Out of all the flippin tools in the box surely some combo can get us there. If not it should be coming soon. I hope.

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Yeah - I don’t know if there is a good way to share patcher creations… I’ll look into it.

Using the piano roll to change patterns works well, but maybe we can do better.
it would be ideal to have a drum instrument view, with a few other things like being able to trigger the Fill button (FNC+Page) the same way.

I fully realize DT is a performance tool, and you can do all this stuff by hand which is very cool… but with OB it’s so close to also being an amazing idea box for composition.

Best regards,

Gino

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Here is what I did to make this work…

I connected a keyboard controller to the midi out device, and then edited the keyboard values to be roughly in increments of .01 ( I need to figure out the conversion here, as I just did it by process of elimination, and if you send large values to the DT it will lock up).

I named this Pattern Changer, and used the piano roll to send notes to it.

This seems a liitle long way round?
In the DT choose which channel you want program changes received on…say 16

In the OB plugin, in the settings set a midi port in number…say 15…

Open a new midi out track in FL set the port out to 15 and midi channel to 16…

In the pattern selection boxes at the top of the fruity wrapper for the MIDI out you choose your pattern and its fully automatable…also you can configure each of the dials to control the parameters of the midi channels 9 to 16…

Yep - I think that’s the first thing I did, but I found that automating events was messy (at least the way I was doing it).

The point of mapping to notes is that you can use the piano roll.
Here I’m switching between 5 patterns, to align to the WAV of the song I’m updating.

Best regards,

Gino

Edit: I’ve attached the preset for Patcher I used. Theoretically anyone can load it into Patcher who has FL Studio 20+.

Only the white keys are mapped to pattern numbers, and I only did A01 - A14.

C4 = A01
D4 = A02
E4 = A03
F4 = A04
G4 = A05
A4 = A06
B4 = A07
C5 = A08
D5 = A09
E5 = A10
F5 = A11
G5 = A12
A5 = A13
B5 = A14

DigitaktPatternChanger.fst (3.1 KB)

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A guy wrote a VST to do program changes - might be interesting to play with too.

https://forum.image-line.com/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=192310&p=1335050&hilit=Midi+hardware+pattern+change#p1335050

Also I’m reading around more in the daw manual (RTFM right? :rofl:) and event editor is gettingme closer. Still drawing things in but you can use the tools - scale option to get you for example from 0-127 or 0-99 (Korg monologue program change range) or whatever you need AND you can set the tools - snap and set it to step or beat or bar. Takes a bit to set it up and I think we have different goals, but for me this works for a way to do pattern changes. Waaaay easier than using automation clips and drawing the dots from 0 - random pattern number. Just feels super klunky.

For the more real-time oriented pattern changes the keyboard method you created seems to be the best way to do it or maybe a launchpad and event editor clips assigned to each pad would be kinda neat. It’s pretty open ended and you just take the time to set up your own workflow.

Sharing the next thing I learned with DT and FLS.

I spent 2 days trying to get midi working properly.
I had the DT setup as a generic midi controller, but no matter what I did, I kept getting midi note doubling, and then note cancelling across channels.
I got so frustrated that I started to consider switching DAWs.

Then as a last ditch effort, I started choosing different device drivers, and low and behold using Novation Launchpad fixed my problems! No doubling of notes, no midi canceling, and all channels and CC’s worked perfect. Thank goodness because I really want to stay with FLS.

Edit: I found that the Novation Launchpad configuration is not a perfect match. The piano roll does not react to midi notes. For the time being I switch to the generic midi config when I need to record notes from the DT, then back to the Novation Launchpad for performance.

Edit #2: By trial and error I found that the Midi Out plug-in https://www.image-line.com/support/flstudio_online_manual/html/plugins/MIDI%20Out.htm handles midi the best with the DT (vs sending notes to the VST).

Best regards,

Gino

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This is good to know…

Its not a “driver” but a set up configuration of the devices midi map…but a great idea !!!..i have to set my yamaha n12 transport up as a makie big knob for the same reason.

I have been struggling with the loop back of midi with the DT aswel…im going to give this a go and report back…great find.

Hi Everyone,

I did some testing for another thread, and wanted to share what I found:

In my setup FL Studio works best if you DON’T route the channels in the instruments processing tab, but instead only do them as audio inputs in the mixer.

In my case I am using the DT as my audio interface, so maybe that’s part of why this works better so YMMV. Here is what it looks like with the Main, and tracks 1-8 split out. Note that I turn down the audio on the DT instrument track as I found it gets digital artifacts (the “modem” sound).

If I do map the audio with the instrument processing tab, I get these weird audio “modem” sounds and sometimes the first beat is skipped. When I only map with the mixer, I get clean audio, and the first beat is always there.

Anyone else seeing this? Or have different results?

Best regards,

Gino

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I have never heard this sound? What is your buffer settings and are you tracking from the mixer, driver or hybrid?

Interesting… I’m using mixer tracking, but all 3 settings do the same thing (the modem sound)

I’ve systematically tried every combination of buffer and performance settings for OB. The setting that’s working best is small buffers and high performance. Bigger buffers get me a lot more of the modem sound.

I’ve tried multiple computers, so I assumed others are experiencing the same thing. Now I’m thinking it might be a problem with my DT.

Cpu type ?

The CPU on my new notebook is a i7-6820HQ @ 2.7Ghz

Does it happen if you disable all MIDI in and out like you describe above???

Sorry I missed this message, and I’ll try that tonight.

Edit: I tested turning off USB midi in and out, and it still had the “modem” effect.

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The latest OB beta helped a lot!

Here is a problem I was having on the old version of OB (v2.0.14)
I didn’t talk about this before up here, but after about 5-10 minutes of using the DT in FLS I would hear an audio glitch, and then I’d have about a half second delay on the audio from my DT. It was super annoying, but I would just work with it. The only way to fix it was to exit FLS, then toggle OB mode off and back on, then restart FLS.

To narrow this down I made a “durability” test where I’d run a loop in FLS and monitor task manager. This made it easy to reliably reproduce the problem. While doing this I saw a popup that an update was available for OB (v2.0.16), and after installing, I could no longer reproduce the problem. I worked for a few hours and didn’t have any delays on audio.

Now onto the next issue…

I still get a short “modem” sound when I press Stop in FLS while the DT is running, and now narrowing that down. Here is how I reproduce the modem sound:

  1. Make a simple beat on the DT
  2. Start FL Studio
  3. Add DT VST as a generator (and enable sync clock + transport)
  4. Start the DT playing (not the transport in FLS, press the play button on the DT)
  5. Click on the Stop button a few times in FLS while the DT is playing

I have multiple computers, and this works on all of them to hear that weird modem sound.
Oddly, when I turned off clock receive on the DT midi config, I still get this sound.

Please note that I don’t run the DT like this, it’s just a way to reproduce the weird sound. That sound shows up when you loop record, and sometimes at the start of audio track recording. That’s actually why it’s an issue for me.

Best regards,

Gino

Adding a few more notes to my ongoing quest to get FLS + OB + DT working exactly how I want them.

I started using Total Recall, and now have it in my default template for FLS.
Meaning that when I start FLS, there is already a DT VST, and it has Total Recall with Sync on save enabled.

This seemed a bit crazy at first, but now that I’m used to it, it’s really nice!
When you load an FLS file, you can choose if you want to use the plug-in state (the DAW) or the device state (the DT). I find that I press [YES] or [NO], and even if I forget and load another file, it asks again.

Basically you work on the DT for a bit, tweak some things, then use Ctrl+S to save any changes (if you choose to). You can even use Save As to make a new “project”.

I do miss being able to use [FUNC] + [YES] and [FUNC] + [NO] to quickly save / restore changes, and
that only works for me if I unload the DT VST.

Anyone else using Total Recall with FLS?

Best regards,

Gino

@Gino thanks so much for continuing to add your experiences, tweaks and insights here. We are really compiling some great stuff! I have not used Total Recall but I did see your other thread where you are getting much better performance and stability out of the latest beta. I cant wait to get that loaded and have a go! Are you seeing any better midi performance? If you’re using that functionality?

I’m running a sort of hybrid workflow where the DAW is not really central to the production. Just got a Strymon Timeline and am excited to utilize the looper function on that, get crazy and then record it in as an audio clip. Using midi to control the loop record mode is not solid for me at all so I cant use it. Plan on sending the CC message for Start / Stop / Record / Play from the DT and hoping I can get tight loops. Then arrangement and automation will happen after I’ve got enough material.

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Thanks!

I can’t say for sure if midi is faster between 14 and 16, but it’s possible.

I’m going to add a post that shows what I ended up with for my midi config in FLS.

FLS is bit odd when it comes to handling midi through it’s VST wrappers. I found that it was easy to get unwanted midi doubling, and cutoffs. The good news is that I ended up with a simple and clean set up.
I’ll post more details on that later… my goal is to share all the midi settings for FLS and DT.

Best regards,

Gino

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