Hey folks,
I had no reponse on the SAC board so maybe someone here can help:
I've had some weird oddities with my two pairs of motormixes recently. We use these side by side in church, one pair for the FOH mix and the other pair for the recording mix.
The two most recurring issues I've had are:
-One of the pairs stops sending MIDI data after 5 - 10 minutes. It will follow the onscreen display, but won't send data to the onscreen display.
-The other pair works fine except when you change screen views from one of the screens with a particular fader fully down to a scene with it up to say 0dB, SAC appears to "read" the incoming MIDI data while the fader is still traveling up to the 0dB position and decides to match the onscreen fader to match, usually occurring when the physical fader is about halfway up, i.e. virtually no output (happens on my mains fader most...not good). I can't tell if it's gotten slower, they're not superfast any day of the week, though.
I took the two fader pack pairs home, along with the Roland UM-One MIDI adapters and ran them on my home test system for hours, day and night and, while one Motormix pack chattered a bit during heavy fader movements during screen changes, everything worked fine. I did change that pack out that was chattering.
I get to church and rehook everything up...same issue.
Now, I did have an XP System at home running SAC 2.9, while my church system is Windows 7 with SAC 3.1, so there's that. I did have to install the UM-one drivers at home so, thinking I had a possible corrupted driver (in two different PCs), I decided to uninstall and reinstall the drivers on the church PCs. I did not get to do this until after the services, so only had about 15 minutes to evaluate, but I did not see any issues.
Over the following couple of weeks, the fader pack pair that was failing after 10 minutes and no longer sending data (but receiving it fine) is still working fine, so that seems to have been due to the Motormix that I changed out and/or deleting and reloading of the Roland UM-One drivers.The drivers are the same version that was already in there, so I can't say for sure why that helped, but it may have.
The other fader pack pair, which was initially re-installed on my FOH Host PC, is still occasionally dropping the mains to half level when switching around the F-key views. So I switched the fader pack pairs for the FOH Host and Recording Remote machines...and it did not follow the fader pack. Different fader pack, same issue...still affects only the FOH Host PC.
The maddening thing is I can't repeat it at will...it just happens. I can rapidly switch F-key views and then sit there and wait for the Motormix pair to catch up, since it can't process the switches as fast as the screen does, and it comes out perfect every time. You'd think that would be a prime time for it to goof up, but nope.
Any ideas on why the on-screen fader might be randomly dropping to halfway? It's always the same fader, the Main Fader, which is the 15th channel on the 16 channel Full Mixer view, but again, it doesn't follow the fader packs, just stays on the same machine. All of these units have been working flawlessly up until recently but now both PCs are having issues with both controllers starting within a week of each other.
I did just get the AMP beta, and am hoping that using one MIDI adapter per Motormix instead of daisy chaining pairs might work out better, and will at least make troubleshooting easier, but I have not yet set things up with it yet.
Thanks,
Jeff