Arturia Minilab MKII - Knobs not receiving transmitted values from DAW

[jingubaan]

Hey all,

Just bought a Minilab MK2 today.. awesome little controller. However, I am trying to map the knobs to control plugin parameters via MIDI learn. Everything is work pretty well except, when the DAW transmits midi positions for the knobs, the hardware unit doesn't seem to be receiving them (or may be it doesn't care.. meaning this is not supported). I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong but I have mapped a knob to a parameter and I have set it up (in Studio One 4+) to "transmit the value" for that midi CC back to the controller.  I can also see the DAW doing this in the MIDI Monitor. when I use the knob to control the same parameter in another instance of the same plugin, it jumps to the previous position the controller knew where it was. Which I believe means the controller didn't receive the transmitted cc value for the rotary encoder.



AM I MISSING SOMETHING HERE

I thought this controller can accept incoming CC positions for the encoder can take over the current position of parameters with out having to search for it or just jump around. And I have seen this setup working on other controllers with rotary encoders. If this is something that is not possible with the MiniLab MK2 is kinda makes the rotary encoders half baked and not really useful unless you are using Arturia software.

Any help / clarification would be appreciated.

Thanks heaps in advance

[gmeader]

As far as I know, the Minilab Mk II does not listen to MIDI commands transmitted to it, other than SYSEX commands that are sent by the Arturia MIDI Control Center to configure it.

This means your strategy to have the knobs be synchronized with what the DAW knobs are doing will not work.

However, there is another way to do this. It involves having the Minilab knobs transmit in Relative mode instead of Absolute mode. In Relative mode, turning a knob sends a MIDI command that needs to be interpreted by the DAW to increment or decrement the CC value. This means the DAW will move the CC value up or down from its current position, instead of jumping from whatever the current value is to match the Absolute level transmitted by Minilab knobs in Absolute mode.

You configure Midilab knobs to use Relative mode using Arturia MIDI Control Center software. You have to choose one of three possible Relative mode options - one of those will probably match what your DAW can handle.

Documentation on this is often sparse and cryptic. Here’s a document I wrote, after spending hours figuring it out, that explains in detail how Relative mode works on a MiniLab Mk II and how I configured it for the MPC Beats DAW.
http://chromakinetics.com/mpcbeats.html