I’m curious how the MIDI tracks work in regards to passing data from their channels to the output. My set up involves:
external MIDI sources > OT > multiple external synths
I would expect the MIDI tracks to behave somewhat like thru machines in the audio mode of the OT, but they seem to have their outputs or inputs of incoming MIDI bottle necked by the MIDI > Channels > AUTO Ch setting. This setting needs to be chosen to one MIDI channel, seemingly only letting through one of the 16 channels of MIDI data possible (or 8 at least for the OT).
Is there any way around this? Here’s a video illustraing this and another question. Time stamps for easy seeking.
Hi,
Welcome to the forum @explodingPSYCH
The auto channel generally controls the active track, meaning you need to change the active track on the device itself but not the midi channel which is assigned to the role of auto channel.
By changing the active track, it should automatically patch the midi coming out of the controller to that active track.
Most elektron devices do not wait in a pending record state for transport to come through, but I see what you’re talking about because I pulled up the video.
If you’ve already followed the same setup steps, have assigned the OT to receive clock and transport and are putting it into live recording mode as he shows, then I suspect there is a step not being shown.
This is the video in question for anyone else’s reference.
Elektron devices generally require the manual sync / button hopping method that you described so it has always been my impression that it is necessary to do that for recording midi into the sequencer.
Perhaps someone else will have a better idea of why the behavior in the video is as such, but mk1 vs mk2 should not have anything to do with it.
Try watching this for the auto channel setup. While it’s not an octatrack and he’s working with multiple devices, the principles should still be the same.
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Thanks for the response! I think I’m understanding Auto Channel a little more now. It’s designed to have one input device follow whatever MIDI track you’re working with. That makes sense. After testing it that way, I can see the logic.
I think I’m just used to piping various different channels into my Arturia Beatstep pro at the same time and having them all flow through the four separate channels without having to select them. Obviously a different design philosophy here.
They do if you send the channel of the midi track you want to pass thru.
Midi tracks channels have to be different from audio tracks ones (default audio tracks channels are 1-8 in MIDI > CHANNELS)
Ex if you set a midi track to channel 9, send channel 9 to OT, midi is sent thru midi out, on channel 9.
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Hell yeah. Totally solved! I was misunderstanding the MIDI > Channels settings to be related to the MIDI tracks, not the audio tracks. I also didn’t know about them needing to not be the same channels. So I can just deactivate the audio channels here (Turn 1-8 to OFF) and then turn them on to unused channels as needed in the future if I need this feature. Nice.
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