MIDI Routing Help: OT+DT+Faderfox UC4, is this possible?

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I wonder if you fellow nerds can help me with this:

My current setup is as follows:

Faderfox UC4 (MIDI OUT) —>(MIDI IN) Digitakt (MIDI OUT) —> (MIDI IN) Octatrack

This works well, but there’s a PITA part to it: setting up the MIDI channels in the DT as to receive the data from the UC4, then transmit to the OT (so I can also control CCs on it).

Of course maybe you would ask “why don’t you use the MIDI THRU for that?” Well, because in that case I wouldn’t get clock and transport transmitted from the DT to the OT.

I was hoping to make some MIDI mapping changes, which would imply configuring it the way I want it in one DT pattern, then copy-pasting this new config across every single pattern… quite tedious.

So, I was thinking, since the Faderfox has MIDI Merge fuctionality, maybe I can route it like this:

OT (MIDI OUT - only transport and clock)—> (MIDI IN - with MIDI MERGE activated as to send it to it’s MIDI OUT port) Faderfox UC4 (MIDI OUT)—> (MIDI IN) Digitakt (MIDI THRU) —> (MIDI IN) Octatrack (so it receives some control functions from the UC4)

This would change the master clock (from DT to OT) but would theoretically allow me to keep both machines in sync while controlling different CCs on both with my Faderfox… unless I’m missing something, I guess there shouldn’t be any MIDI feedback…(of course I would have to also disable transpor/clock recieve on the OT)?

EDIT: I had an Eureka moment and thought: “the faderfox has a mini trs output, and I have a mini trs splitter… wouldn’t I be able to use it to split the MIDI OUT to two devices?” so I tried it and… it worked! not entirely sure how stable this might be, but I might give it a chance… haven’t figured out the clock thing yet, but I think that shouldn’t be too complicated

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You actually dont need a splitter. The faderfox also has midi in with true functionality. So you can sent clock from digitakt to allow the faderfox to sent clock also.

Than output of fader -> octa and thru to digitakt. Basically making a midi loop. Just make sure you dont loop cc around from the digitakt.

Or add extra device to sent clock into faderfox

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Oh right! I’ll try this out… thanks!

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update: it works! thanks for the suggestion :nerd_face:
there’s one caveat though… MIDI clock can be unstable when sending multiple parameters at once - I tried moving 4 faders with sudden, continuos movements and BPM seemed to get as unstable as +/- 10 BPM… but then again, I probably wouldn’t send as much data in a regular situation. I’ll have to play around and see.
I did play with it in a “normal” scenario, playing for around 30 minutes - and it seemed pretty much ok (or stable enough for me not to notice any drastic drifts)…
even if I wanted to be on the safe side and use the old method, this is quite handy to try out mappings without the need top copy/paste across all patterns on the DT MIDI tracks.

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