Launch Control and general external MIDI handling

VCV Rack
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Hello everyone, I’m just started out with VCVRack, this software is amazing and with the MIDI MAP and REC modules I’m really having a good time.

Right now I was able to use correctly a LaunchKey and the knobs/directional buttons on the LaunchControl(not XL). My problem now is that I don’t know how to assign the 1-8 buttons on the controller, but still able to use them as notes. Yet the directional buttons and all the knobs works as expected.

I was planning to use them to control the triggers on modules, like the RUN on the sequencer on REC but apparently even trying different channels doesn’t do the trick. Using Windows MIDI if that’s important. Thanks in advance

edit: I haven’t tried yet but now I’m worrying about testing a launchpad S, please an answer even explaining why this post is off-topic can be useful. Again, Thanks in advance

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Maybe you need to edit the Launch Control to send CC messages from the buttons? I don’t remember if they send notes or CCs by default…

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What do you mean by “edit the launch control”?

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Using the Novation Launch Control Editor application.

I just checked that the VCV MIDI map module doesn’t work with MIDI note messages. So you won’t be able to use a single button as both a note and a CC controller in a single preset of the Launch Control. But you can choose some of the buttons to send notes and others to send CCs in the Novation editor application.

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My MIDI-CAT module supports MIDI note messages.

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6

… and MIDI-CAT by stoermelder is the better solution to map anyway, it supports soft takeover, in case you want to map multiple templates and avoid jumping and it uses far less CPU which can quickly become improtant if you map a lot of controls.

Now what you probably want to do is use the user templates to control knobs and buttons in rack and use the factory template to have access to the notes/keyboard functions.

Use the Launch Control Editor to edit your user templates. You can set a different channel to all controls of your user templates in the Launchcontrol Editor software (the factory preset 1 uses channel 1), which is a bit annoying sometimes because the channel has to be set for each control individually, but then you can additionally map up to 8x32 knobs and 8x24 buttons with a few more MIDI-CAT modules (1 per channel) and still use the factory template for notes.

Use a MIDI-CV module to get the notes from channel 1 of the Launch Control factory preset and a MIDI-CAT module for the knobs and sliders, then use another MIDI-CAT on channel 2 for knobs, sliders and buttons of a user preset and another one for each additional channel you want to use.

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