I just discovered this bizarre behavior while building a piece of hardware that can follow DIN sync. I thought I’d test it with my Digitakt… and what the?
There seem to be four transport states in Digitakt:
- running
- paused (▷ from here will continue from where the transport is)
- stopped (▷ from here will restart from the beginning of the pattern)
- stop-stopped (like stopped)
But there are only three DIN sync states:
- running: clock line is going, run-stop line is high
- not-running: clock line is going, run-stop line is low
- weird: clock line is low, run-stop line is high
Sadly, when either paused or stopped, the DIN sync is in not-running mode - and you can’t tell the difference… so when the run-stop line goes high again, the other equipment doesn’t know if it should continue from where it left off, or restart from the top of the pattern. Sigh!
I’ve seen other spec docs for DIN sync that say to implement paused, the run-stop should remain high, and simply stop the clock. This makes sense… only that state is the wierd one on Digitakt, and clearly means full-stop, restart from top of pattern when ▷ is pressed.
The weird state is… well, weird? What ever is it for?