MIDI Control of Recording - What does it mean?

[Aaron]

We are reviewing open feature requests and could really use your help regarding one of them: The ability to engage/disengage recording via MIDI.

This concept could mean a few different things:

1. Being able to press the MIDI button using a custom Note On Message
2. Following the Record/Play commands of an external piece of hardware for sync purposes. As a follow up question, what protocol should we use as there are a few options.
3. Being able to start/stop loop recording remotely.
4. Something else?

I know it is tempting to say that you want all of those things. If this feature is important to you, please weigh in with some specifics.

Thank you very much.

[Georges]

My use case for this would be to remotely trigger the audio recording of a clip by pushing the play transport button on my midi sequencer in my audio workstation, a Korg Kronos that is. The recording issue is when recording clips with an upbeat: in this scenario, bb’s threshold On is recording too late and its threshold Off may be too imprecise, depending on my precision as a human.

[Isak126]

My dream case would be mapping each pad record button to a midi note. Like how you trigger the pad playback now. Together with having a specified record length (loop record would be even more amazing) so you could easily record on the fly using one bank on the midi controller (mpd218 or fighter twister in my case), then change to another bank to play stop the recording - like you can today. Being able to do this process without having to interact with the screen would be amazing. Also that the pad remembers the settings for filter midi map and so alike between recordings would be great.

[valeriodaniele]

Thank you Aaron...
In my case "Being able to start/stop loop recording remotely"! I would love to use BB also as a live looper and this should be the first step...along with others but I don't want to exaggerate

[srirupa]

I'm definitely interested in this. Some simple controls would be extremely welcome and useful, and would be great to see extended in the future.

The way I'd imagine it working would be that I could assign a note or CC to each pad, to directly record/play that buffer according to however it's set up with respect to length/quantize/etc. Use case is a 16 track looper controlled via MIDI footswitches

Allowing for latched or momentary recording would be great.

Alternatively or additionally, some "active pad" rec/play/stop/clear commands, along with a way to select prev/next pad would be decent way to control everything with a minimum of footswitches.

The details of the implementation aren't as important to me, as long as it's documented, and ideally easy to extend along with any looper focused features you might decide to add (like overdub or multiply)

[byrdinbbylon]

I'd be happy with just the ability to start recording on a loop based on a MIDI message (note, CC or whatever). Similar to how you can can click on a pad (clip) to arm it to play, perhaps you could click on a pad to arm it to record. Then, the external MIDI signal could be received by the BB to start, playing the play clips and recording the record armed pad. This would be mainly if I wanted to perform something immediately (like a guitar part or keys part) upon record start. If the count-in was also applied to playback clips, that would work too (separate feature request).

Another cool option to make recording loops easier would be if you could arm a pad for record while other clips are playing. Then, when you send a MIDI signal into the BB, that pad would go into record on the next bar or whatever the record start quantize value is set to, recording for the set length of time. This would be like a set length punch in loop recording. That way, you could jam along or flesh out ideas before it actually starts recording and only press a pedal to send the MIDI signal when you are ready to record.

[sirshannon]

I use a Pyramid sequencer for controlling the Bluebox (and everything else in my setup). Right now I can hold the REC button on the Blub and start recording when I hit PLAY on the Pyramid. That's great but what I would like is to be able to start recording with a CC message or something similar so that I could either send that CC message as a 1-off while the Blub is already playing and all armed tracks would start recording. until I hit STOP on the Pyramid.

For starting a recording at the beginning, to replace holding REC now, it would be cool to have a setting that let me choose whether or not I needed to hold the record button. Like a SUPER ARM AUTO REC toggle or something? Otherwise, the ways I imagine changing this flow seem fiddly. I hope that's a limit of my imagination.

Only slightly related but related: I wish I had to hit STOP twice on the Pyramid to make the Blub stop recording, sort of how the Blackbox requires 2 STOP presses to stop any sequences that are playing. When recording, I want to stop all of the MIDI that is playing but not stop the recording because there are tails and trails I don't want to miss. I don't think I ever want to hit "stop" on the Pyramid to stop the MIDI instruments it is controlling and also dead stop a recording on the Blub.

[Revtor]

Perhaps these (record/arm/stop, etc) type of commands are wrapped into a single CC. (127 -RecOn / 0-RecOff). Or maybe on/off values could be per pad. Pad record settings could "autofill" to the last parameters used for recording. So you'd only have to set the recording parameters once and could then record into multiple pads without needing to set it up each time.

[thatstreal]

I wish I was able to convey my Ideals for this implementation better, but I lack the vernacular to express what I'd like to see technically! But here goes!

Id love to be able to use the blackbox sort of like how the Boss Rc series operates (rc-101,505), As for midi implementation is concerned, being a Midifighter 3d user, Id love to be able to trigger a looping sequence with the press of button, and press it again to close the loop, the ability to have it quantized to the bpm as-well would be awesome! that alone would be a game changer for live loop recording!