Does anyone here have experience with using a Vestax VCM 600 to control Rack? I just got one and am tearing my hair out because each row of faders and knobs seems to send out the same cc message (ie. all the faders are cc23, the entire first row of knobs is cc22 etc.). This currently makes it almost completely useless for what I want to do to it (map all the faders and knobs to various module controls as you would expect to with a midi controller)… why would they make it this way?
It probably transmits on different midi channels
Yep, @chaircrusher has it exactly right, per the spec–see page 34, which is the CC setup. You get messages with first byte B0…B5 [there’s a typo in the manual, it has B4 twice] for CCs 16 to 23, which are channels 1 through 6, and then with track bank on you get the same CCs starting with B6 through BB (channels 7 through 12). Doesn’t seem configurable. It’s basically designed to work only with Ableton.
Various ways to handle this, inside and outside of Rack–if you know a little bit of Python (or want to learn) you could easily write a custom adapter using python-rtmidi–check out the MIDI filter example for a good starting point.
Thanks both, what a silly thing. At least I know now I can make it usable with some work.
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The brute force solution is to open a Midi Mapper - VCV has one that I can’t get to work the way I want it to - is to have a separate MIDI-CC module for each channel of the mixer. Then you can map them all. Tedious but doable.
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The brute force solution it to buy a better controller. That’s what I finally did.
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Sounds like the best approach–it doesn’t look like anyone’s written a “merge MIDI channels while offsetting CC per channel” module for Rack (at first I thought the Kilpatrick stuff might do it, but doesn’t look like it).
I’ve come to really like standing up a MIDI processor script for this kind of thing–you solve your problem once rather than having to figure out a new solution for each program you’re using, and once you learn the basic approach you have a very powerful tool at your disposal. (I use little scripts to debounce drum pads all the time, for example, or to add various kinds of functionality to basic controllers.)
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