So I have a new system with 3 BCF2000 units for a SAC control surface. I have been using this for two productions now and so far they have worked out pretty well. But on the last production I did run into an issue. I was writing a scene where I wanted to fade some input and output faders over a period of a few seconds. In the past this has always worked just fine when using old Yamaha digitals for a control surface.
However this time around, when I would do this, the faders on the screen would fade in the time frame specified (and the audio in SAC would follow suit luckily). But the faders on the BCF units would sputter and jerk around and take anywhere from 30 seconds to sometimes a couple of minutes before they would inch their way to the correct fader position. Obviously this was worthless to me so at the time I just set the fade time back to zero and dealt with it and in one case made a special submaster fader that was not controlled by the surface so I could fade a couple of things up and down over set times.
I have these units all hooked up via USB by the way. I am using MIID-Ox to combine the USB MIDI ports and send them all to SAC via a virtual MIDI cable. And then another virtual MIDI cable out of SAC is split in MIDI-Ox and sent to all the surfaces.
I emailed Bob about the issue and he said that the MIDI messages were probably not being sent in the correct order and so the surface is fighting with itself. In my little bit of detective work I've done so far that made some sense as I saw he was using NRPR messages so he could get greater than 128 step resolution when using BCF faders. So it makes sense that if those messages are not sent in just the right pattern then it could lead to issues. I guess I will have to do some more experiments and see if I can figure out a solution. Maybe try one surface first and maybe try it all hooked up to a MIDI interface rather than USB as well. Or I could use the mode that lets you daisy chain multiple BCF units and that way I could perhaps not need MIDI-Ox as the surface will present itself as a single USB MIDI port.
Anyway, I'm mostly just posting to see if others have run into this issue and as a word of warning for others that may run into this. I suspect there is no real solution other than maybe tinkering with different modes and ways of getting the MIDI data in and out of SAC.
If anyone has any brilliant solutions I am of course all ears...
Hope everyone's summer is going well. I have finally had some time to come up for air.
Richard