Has anyone else noticed that after you start the Octatrack, if you start a Plays Free Midi track without running the main sequencer sometimes the Octatrack spits out garbage CCs? Like different values and not even the CCs that you have set.
Work around is to start the main sequencer first. Project keeps having the bug tho on every start, even after saving and reloading the project.
I’m mainly just posting to complain about having spent my night trying to track down the issue. Thought was a bug in something I coded up myself, only to find it was actually the Octa…
It was midi plays free DIRECT rather than quantised. Really powerful now that it works.
Another thing that seems to be fixed is on the audio side where you have a neighbour as plays free direct. Great for triggering mini fx sequences but used to cause freezes. (In my experience - undocumented!)
I call it the ‘yellow freeze’ - first trig stuck at yellow LED, sequencer not running, input LEDs frozen at whatever level at the time of freeze. Hello old friend!
For my issue it only happens immediately after turning the unit on, before pushing the main play button at all. Also I suspect that my copy/pasting of midi tracks earlier on in the project may have created the “junk” midi data that is being picked up by plays free. Its not completely random, it looks like old CCs that existed on that track.
I’m still grappling with this. The phantom CCs are being sent even by a midi plays-free track when it is first played. My initial fix of starting the main sequencer first doesn’t actually solve it.
Switching to an untouched part/pattern in the same project didn’t fix it either. Something behind the scenes has decided to hold onto old cc #s to send when starting the playsfree sequence for that track. What did fix it was creating a completely new project.
I’m at a loss for what I did to get my project into this state in the first place. I’ve done a fair bit of copy/pasting of parts/tracks/pages so something in that may have gotten it into a bad place. I’m concerned that this new project will get stuck in this again. I’m hoping that I can get my material off the old project with some bank-copying or octaedit, because otherwise I may just have to let those sequences go.
Note: I also tried turning playsfree off and back on for the track. Did not resolve the phantom ccs sending when playsfree was re-enabled.
Do you have OctaEdit?
If I have a little moment with a big curiosity peak I can try your project if you want.
I bought OctaEdit recently but I didn’t use it decently, my laptop having 1 third of the screen out…
Its ok, creating a new project and copy-pasting in the banks I needed (via my computer) seems to have made the problem go away. I was already getting rid of junk in my project so I was already going to do some of this anyways.
I learned an interesting thing about the octatrack midi while I was debugging this. It only sends the new CCs for a part change if the cc or value for a knob changes. In some ways this is useful in not sending out too much data to a synth. But it also means if you do a program change and the synth on the other end loads a bunch of new params, the values you have set on the octa may never get sent.
Really important to know when debugging / testing. I’d like an option for that, be able to send a midi message when I want. There are several ways to reduce midi data stream, especially lfo hold parameter.
