DAW Choice?

[mntbighker]

Anyone care to comment on what DAW's have Keystep Pro "fully" supported. Bitwig doesn't even list the model at all. There are apparently third party "scripts" for Beatstep Pro that may or may not have been abandoned. My primary interest right now is getting a sequence track played in the DAW to record via midi into a KSP track. It's a longer story than that, but that's the short version. I looked at Studio One for a while but abandoned that because Bitwig appeared to have better feature alignment for a VCV/Eurorack user. I have avoided Abelton because of their upgrade policies and prices.

Help

[Andrew Henderson]

Anyone care to comment on what DAW's have Keystep Pro "fully" supported. Bitwig doesn't even list the model at all. There are apparently third party "scripts" for Beatstep Pro that may or may not have been abandoned. My primary interest right now is getting a sequence track played in the DAW to record via midi into a KSP track. It's a longer story than that, but that's the short version. I looked at Studio One for a while but abandoned that because Bitwig appeared to have better feature alignment for a VCV/Eurorack user. I have avoided Abelton because of their upgrade policies and prices.

Help

The Keystep Pro does not record into its sequencer tracks, the incoming midi from any DAW.  you must populate the steps of the sequencer from on the Keystep Pro itself.

I don't believe any DAW, fully supports the KSP, in any meaningful way.  The KSP it's meant to be universal and should work the same in any software. I use Cubase 11 and don't have any real problems, but I don't use it the way you're expecting it to work.

[synthcreep]

I think we need clarification on what "via MIDI" means in this context as well as what the MIDI sequence looks like in the DAW.

The KSP supports one MIDI channel per track.  If you play a sequence via the hardware MIDI in *and* it contains one or more of the MIDI channels that are assigned within the KSP it will funnel the incoming note stream based on the MIDI channel to each track while recording.  Recently I did this to get some tracks from my old Beatstep Pro into the KSP.  You need to do this a pattern at a time and the KSP needs to be set to receive transport control messages so it starts at the same time.  You also need to manually set the bar lengths on each track to match what you are sending and it generally will need to loop a few times to get all the notes due to the MIDI delay at the start.  It does work though, at least it did for me.

The key is that the KSP is pattern based so can at maximum have a bar pattern with 64 steps total.  If you can make your DAW loop for each pattern, you have a max of 4 MIDI channels and you need no more than 16 patterns per track you can likely reconstruct sequences in the KSP.  If you have a freeform sequence that does not use a pattern approach or it would require more than 16 patterns per project then you are out of luck.

[psienide]

I use my KSP with Cakewalk by Bandlab. I can do this and everything else you would expect - but there isn't a ready-made template for it. You have to manually map the controller inputs to functions.

I've tried just about every daw out there and find that Cakewalk is the best for my workflow and mix of audio recording and midi sequencing. It has some of the best sequencing features of any daw.

Plus it's free.

[mntbighker]

I think we need clarification on what "via MIDI" means in this context as well as what the MIDI sequence looks like in the DAW.

Thanks for the comments. At present my total experience doing this involves playing a sequence in VCV Rack, connected via CV / Midi that the KSP was able to save/record into a sequence track. So I knew it was possible on some level. Your comments are very helpful.

[mntbighker]

I use my KSP with Cakewalk by Bandlab. I can do this and everything else you would expect - but there isn't a ready-made template for it. You have to manually map the controller inputs to functions.

I've tried just about every daw out there and find that Cakewalk is the best for my workflow and mix of audio recording and midi sequencing. It has some of the best sequencing features of any daw.

Plus it's free.

A shame it's Windows only.

[psienide]

A shame it's Windows only.

Good excuse to load up parallels

[Andrew Henderson]

I think we need clarification on what "via MIDI" means in this context as well as what the MIDI sequence looks like in the DAW.

Thanks for the comments. At present my total experience doing this involves playing a sequence in VCV Rack, connected via CV / Midi that the KSP was able to save/record into a sequence track. So I knew it was possible on some level. Your comments are very helpful.

I guess I am wrong.  Either something has changed, or I did it wrong last summer, when I first got the KSP.  I tried playing a midi sequence from Cubase, into the KSP and hoped to record what was being played from this midi part in Cubase, into the sequencers of the KSP and it didn't work. 

I apologize for steering you in the wrong direction.  I guess I learned something new today and need to try this out again.

[psienide]

I tried playing a midi sequence from Cubase, into the KSP and hoped to record what was being played from this midi part in Cubase, into the sequencers of the KSP and it didn't work.

I'm using a different DAW but I found that I had to use the record-play mode to get this to work. Set the sync source to your daw and when your daw clock starts it should start the recording process on the KSP.

[mntbighker]

I guess I am wrong.  Either something has changed, or I did it wrong last summer, when I first got the KSP.  I tried playing a midi sequence from Cubase, into the KSP and hoped to record what was being played from this midi part in Cubase, into the sequencers of the KSP and it didn't work. 

I apologize for steering you in the wrong direction.  I guess I learned something new today and need to try this out again.

To cut yourself a little slack, I think they may have made this work (or work better) in a firmware update. Could be when you tried it the feature wasn't there yet.

[mntbighker]

The more I look into this, the worse the news seems to get. The general tone from Reddit on Abelton and KSP is that it's been an unmitigated disaster. I have yet to find a glowing review of this DAW works great with my shiny new KSP. I thought at least one would stand out. I mean what did they do product development with?

[mntbighker]

A shame it's Windows only.

Good excuse to load up parallels

My gawd, can you imagine the nightmares with Midi, latency, and hardware abstraction, adding virtualization to what is already a sketchy situation? That and there is no working virtualization option with current ARM based Apple hardware.

[psienide]

My gawd, can you imagine the nightmares with Midi, latency, and hardware abstraction, adding virtualization to what is already a sketchy situation? That and there is no working virtualization option with current Apple ARM based Apple hardware.

There's supposed to be a latency offset for USB passthrough in the later versions of parallels. But yeah - on an ARM device I think you'll be out of luck.

On your other comment about KSP being poorly reviewed - I share the sentiments of most of those. It's just lacking too much as a controller for software based uses. However, my application is mainly in controlling of eurorack, and while I find that it's STILL lacking some basic features you would expect, I am usually able to get the job done with a mix of DAW automation through the KSP.

[mntbighker]

There's supposed to be a latency offset for USB passthrough in the later versions of parallels. But yeah - on an ARM device I think you'll be out of luck.

On your other comment about KSP being poorly reviewed - I share the sentiments of most of those. It's just lacking too much as a controller for software based uses. However, my application is mainly in controlling of eurorack, and while I find that it's STILL lacking some basic features you would expect, I am usually able to get the job done with a mix of DAW automation through the KSP.

Generally agreed on the Eurorack control.