After a few years and having briefly owned ModDwarf, I purchased a Rig Kontrol 3 and was hoping to run it with Modep…unfortunately I haven’t had much success.
I installed the latest version of Patchbox os on a Raspberry PI 3b and installed modep as a module.
I can hear the clean audio, but as I put a couple of plugins (a distortion and a reverb) the sound has become all robotic despite the cpu and ram being low, if I try to restart jackd nothing is heard anymore and it’s need to restart everything.
I couldn’t even use the peripheral as a midi… it’s recognized but it doesn’t seem to get messages…
I will try to “divide the problems” and understand how to intervene.
I have some questions: Is it possible to install modep on a clean Raspbian distribution?
Is there a port for linux x64 to have more computing power?
Thank you
@ClaudioCas@aFunkyBass and I both have/had Rig Kontrol 2 in the past, I think aFunkyBass still has his. I ran into the same issues with mine and aFunkyBass helped me understand that the RK2 (and likely the RK3) does not function as a true MIDI controller, it’s a proprietary device that is meant to work with Native Instruments products only. I think he wrote a Python program to intercept the codes from the RK2 and convert to MIDI. Now for the RK3 there “might” be a way to switch the device over to a true MIDI controller, the manual might shed some light on that.
Thanks for your kind reply.
I read the conversation about Rig Kontrol 2 (that’s where the idea of getting the Rig Kontrol 3 started)… But RK3 is seen directly as a midi port… does it also happen with RK2?
I don’t think it was possible to set the original RK or RK2 to a pure MIDI controller. According to NI’s site you can switch the RK3 to a MIDI controller but not sure if it retains that state once disconnected from Control Editor. I’m sure you’ve seen this article but just in case, here’s a link with more information:
@ClaudioCas the RK3 midi port reported by your system is the phisycal 5 pin DIN port on the back of your controller, but it has nothing to do with the pedal switches on the device. Actually RK2 (and I guess RK 3 is no different) emulates a QWERY USB keyboard… Connect your RK to you PC, open a text editor and press one of the pedal switches, you will se corresponding number appearing on the screen. Say you press button 1, you will see “1” (ASCII character #49) on your editor.
I couldn’t find a way to make my RK2 to generate MIDI messages from button presseing, so I decided to write the code you find in the topic Hacking a RigKontrol 2 as a MODEP controller
I’m using it for live performing on a regular basis since then and it works. The audio part works decently although latency is a bit of an issue… In the past I had problem with the sound becoming robotic like you said, I don’t face these problems anymore. I moved to a RPi4 and I guess that solved the problem.
For the sake of truth I’ve got to to admit that, after almost 3 years, I’m working to a new setup: I bought a PiSound a few weeks ago and I’m building a Pedalino Mini MIDI Controller to control Modep.
I really don’t know why I’m doing all of this, because, aside a better sound quality and a lower latency, I will end up getting no extra features compared to my current setup… Conversely, I may have a regression as I will no longer have the ability to switch among pedalboards with footswitches butonly operating “the button”. In fact it’s still impossible to load a pedalboard setup via a MIDI message (@Giedrius could you confirm please?) I guess I like to put myself in trouble from time to time.
I’ve just looked into this in the latest MODEP version, and it looks like it is somewhat possible to do, but works in the most unobvious way imaginable.
First, you have to edit /var/modep/profile5.json and set midiChannelForPedalboardsNavigation to a chosen channel between 1-16, and same for midiChannelForSnapshotsNavigation if you want to be able to switch between snapshots too. It would make sense to use different channels. Any number outside of [1;16] range means disabled.
Changing snapshots works just fine.
Here comes the amazing part - changing pedalboards works, as long as there’s no open web sessions. I have no idea why MOD designed it this way.
Other than this, you could look into MIDI Command Server - you could make your controller trigger shell scripts and do whatever you want.
I did that previously but I couldn’t get through, maybe I’ll give it another try as I wasn’t sure whether the midi channels we numbered 0-15 or 1-16 on that file… Thank you for pointing out.
After editing the profile5.json, it’s probably a good idea to restart your system, or just the modep-mod-ui service: sudo systemctl restart modep-mod-ui, it’s probably read at process startup.
