A Couple of Issues

[sprint]

I'm running on a Macbook Pro with MacOS 10.13.6 and have noted a couple of issues:

1. In the MFC-101 preset section - when defining custom midi messages, if the last byte of the midi message is "00" the message length will not allow the "00" value to be included. The result is that all of these need to be updated afterward directly on the MFC - very frustrating.

2. Randomly, while working in the MFC-101 preset section, and when changing presets using the up/down arrows, the program fails and starts drawing random black boxes every where the mouse point goes - it's completely lost and needs to be shut down and re-started.

General comment - the workflow experience is pretty clunky - almost to the point where its faster to just update the MFC directly particularly when defining custom messages. Having a copy/paste for custom messages would be a big help.

 

[bwanagary]

I'm running on a Macbook Pro with MacOS 10.13.6 and have noted a couple of issues:

1. In the MFC-101 preset section - when defining custom midi messages, if the last byte of the midi message is "00" the message length will not allow the "00" value to be included. The result is that all of these need to be updated afterward directly on the MFC - very frustrating.

2. Randomly, while working in the MFC-101 preset section, and when changing presets using the up/down arrows, the program fails and starts drawing random black boxes every where the mouse point goes - it's completely lost and needs to be shut down and re-started.

General comment - the workflow experience is pretty clunky - almost to the point where its faster to just update the MFC directly particularly when defining custom messages. Having a copy/paste for custom messages would be a big help.

Thanks for the feedback!
1. Under the Custom MIDI Message input there is a "Message Length" input field. If the detected length is shorter than the actual length (ie. you have one or more zero-value bytes at the tail end of the message) just use the little box below the message to set the desired length. It saves, transmits and works correctly. When you have trailing zero-value messages in your custom message there's no way to guess the message length, so you have to input it. Curiously though, the MFC-Edit manual states that

Custom MIDI Message: The MFC-101 can send an arbitrary MIDI command sequence upon being selected. You can enter up to 16 hexadecimal bytes to send. NOTE: The message length is automatically calculated but check it! Do not include any trailing zeroes in the message length. (Ref. Section 12.1.6 of the MFC-101 Owner's Manual). The hexadecimal values can either be directly entered from the keyboard, selected from the drop-down list (see the PRESETS tab of the Preferences window) or pasted from the system clipboard by right-clicking the mouse over the MIDI message and choosing the “Paste MIDI message from clipboard” option.

2. First time I've heard that. I've used that feature extensively myself and not see that behavior. I'll wait to see if anyone else reports it before digging into it for debugging. In the meantime, use the listbox to the left of the Preset Name to choose your preset instead. (Note: I have just been able to replicate the behavior you're seeing. It is only after editing the Custom MIDI message of a preset that this problem manifests. I'll debug it when I get a chance. In the meantime, please use the listbox to the left of the Preset name to select the preset.)

Other notes:
You can copy midi messages from any text editor and paste them into the Custom MIDI message input (the values are expected to be hexadecimal and separated by spaces). Also, next to the Preset Name there is a Copy/Paste button. Hover the mouse over it to see what it does or click it to copy/paste any part of a Preset, including the custom MIDI message. I have added the ability to copy from the Custom MIDI Message also and will probably upload to the Fractal servers tonight or tomorrow.

You can also right-click on most of the input fields for more powerful editing tools and things that are just not possible in the MFC-101 itself.

 

[sprint]

Thanks for the quick response.

Re #1 - I did read that section of the manual and tried to use the message length by typing in the message length and then proceeding to enter a message that corresponded to the entered message length. If you do it this way (which is logical I think), and you type a 00 as the last byte of the message and tab, the message length field will revert to 1 less that what you initially set it to (??) I took from this behaviour that setting the message length was not working. I see now, that, if you set the message length AFTER typing your midi message ending in 00, then the message length retains its value properly. Setting message length before typing the message should work in my view but no matter - I see how it works now.

Re #2 - Fyi - I am working on a second Dell monitor connected to my Macbook pro. Maybe that has something to do with the crashes when hovering over the preset change arrows in the MFC-101 preset section. I dunno but the program definitely has catastrophic failures intermittently in my environment (I've learned to save frequently).

Re: Cut/Paste: I've tried to enter full midi message values in an external editor and copy/paste them as per your suggestion but the full clipboard value seems to want to paste into the first byte of the midi message and I can't seem to highlight more than one byte of the message at a time to paste into. I guess there is a trick I am missing, but I'm not keen on spending much time on this aspect since requiring the user to go out to an external editor to do a simple copy/paste is pretty lame to start with. Yes - I have hovered over the copy/paste button but I don't see any way to copy paste from/to midi message only. There really needs to be the ability to copy from one or more bytes of the midi message only and paste that into the midi message of another preset. Sounds like you are working on that. Great!

Also Re: Cut/Paste: This also needs to apply to the "Program Change" strip of values in the preset section. As you may know the MFC-101 defaults to sending program messages on all channels in all presets which is probably not what a lot of users want. To change this one has to go to each preset and change the "Program Change" values to "off" for all channels except channel 01. This is a major chore on the MFC, and, has to be done whenever MFC might be reset to factory which I do once in a while. MFC-Edit is not much easier as I found out last night when I wanted to set all program change values to "off" on all channels except 01 in the first 50 presets. Maybe I am missing some info on this one also but I tried copy/paste from external editor and copy/paste directly in the "Program Change" values but neither appeared to work. I ended up having to click each "Program Change" value, move the slider to the bottom, and click "off" on each channel value of each preset for 50 presets. That's 3x15x50 or 2250 mouse moves to do that job! So maybe I've missed something here but if I did; I don't think whatever trick I missed is very evident. If this is how it's done then I guess I'm one of the few working in the preset section of this software otherwise there would have been lots of comments long before now.

I don't mean to be down on the software. You've done great work and I would recommend MFC-Edit to others. You also seem very dedicated to the support of it which is great. I just think the workflow of the software relating to repeating tasks (copy / paste is key) can be improved.

Thanks

 

[bwanagary]

Thanks for the quick response.

Re #1 - I did read that section of the manual and tried to use the message length by typing in the message length and then proceeding to enter a message that corresponded to the entered message length. If you do it this way (which is logical I think), and you type a 00 as the last byte of the message and tab, the message length field will revert to 1 less that what you initially set it to (??) I took from this behaviour that setting the message length was not working. I see now, that, if you set the message length AFTER typing your midi message ending in 00, then the message length retains its value properly. Setting message length before typing the message should work in my view but no matter - I see how it works now.

Re #2 - Fyi - I am working on a second Dell monitor connected to my Macbook pro. Maybe that has something to do with the crashes when hovering over the preset change arrows in the MFC-101 preset section. I dunno but the program definitely has catastrophic failures intermittently in my environment (I've learned to save frequently).

Re: Cut/Paste: I've tried to enter full midi message values in an external editor and copy/paste them as per your suggestion but the full clipboard value seems to want to paste into the first byte of the midi message and I can't seem to highlight more than one byte of the message at a time to paste into. I guess there is a trick I am missing, but I'm not keen on spending much time on this aspect since requiring the user to go out to an external editor to do a simple copy/paste is pretty lame to start with. Yes - I have hovered over the copy/paste button but I don't see any way to copy paste from/to midi message only. There really needs to be the ability to copy from one or more bytes of the midi message only and paste that into the midi message of another preset. Sounds like you are working on that. Great!

Also Re: Cut/Paste: This also needs to apply to the "Program Change" strip of values in the preset section. As you may know the MFC-101 defaults to sending program messages on all channels in all presets which is probably not what a lot of users want. To change this one has to go to each preset and change the "Program Change" values to "off" for all channels except channel 01. This is a major chore on the MFC, and, has to be done whenever MFC might be reset to factory which I do once in a while. MFC-Edit is not much easier as I found out last night when I wanted to set all program change values to "off" on all channels except 01 in the first 50 presets. Maybe I am missing some info on this one also but I tried copy/paste from external editor and copy/paste directly in the "Program Change" values but neither appeared to work. I ended up having to click each "Program Change" value, move the slider to the bottom, and click "off" on each channel value of each preset for 50 presets. That's 3x15x50 or 2250 mouse moves to do that job! So maybe I've missed something here but if I did; I don't think whatever trick I missed is very evident. If this is how it's done then I guess I'm one of the few working in the preset section of this software otherwise there would have been lots of comments long before now.

I don't mean to be down on the software. You've done great work and I would recommend MFC-Edit to others. You also seem very dedicated to the support of it which is great. I just think the workflow of the software relating to repeating tasks (copy / paste is key) can be improved.

Thanks

You have some good suggestions here so I'll take a look and see what I can do.
Thanks.

 

[bwanagary]

Thanks for the quick response.

Re #1 - I did read that section of the manual and tried to use the message length by typing in the message length and then proceeding to enter a message that corresponded to the entered message length. If you do it this way (which is logical I think), and you type a 00 as the last byte of the message and tab, the message length field will revert to 1 less that what you initially set it to (??) I took from this behaviour that setting the message length was not working. I see now, that, if you set the message length AFTER typing your midi message ending in 00, then the message length retains its value properly. Setting message length before typing the message should work in my view but no matter - I see how it works now.

Re #2 - Fyi - I am working on a second Dell monitor connected to my Macbook pro. Maybe that has something to do with the crashes when hovering over the preset change arrows in the MFC-101 preset section. I dunno but the program definitely has catastrophic failures intermittently in my environment (I've learned to save frequently).

Re: Cut/Paste: I've tried to enter full midi message values in an external editor and copy/paste them as per your suggestion but the full clipboard value seems to want to paste into the first byte of the midi message and I can't seem to highlight more than one byte of the message at a time to paste into. I guess there is a trick I am missing, but I'm not keen on spending much time on this aspect since requiring the user to go out to an external editor to do a simple copy/paste is pretty lame to start with. Yes - I have hovered over the copy/paste button but I don't see any way to copy paste from/to midi message only. There really needs to be the ability to copy from one or more bytes of the midi message only and paste that into the midi message of another preset. Sounds like you are working on that. Great!

Also Re: Cut/Paste: This also needs to apply to the "Program Change" strip of values in the preset section. As you may know the MFC-101 defaults to sending program messages on all channels in all presets which is probably not what a lot of users want. To change this one has to go to each preset and change the "Program Change" values to "off" for all channels except channel 01. This is a major chore on the MFC, and, has to be done whenever MFC might be reset to factory which I do once in a while. MFC-Edit is not much easier as I found out last night when I wanted to set all program change values to "off" on all channels except 01 in the first 50 presets. Maybe I am missing some info on this one also but I tried copy/paste from external editor and copy/paste directly in the "Program Change" values but neither appeared to work. I ended up having to click each "Program Change" value, move the slider to the bottom, and click "off" on each channel value of each preset for 50 presets. That's 3x15x50 or 2250 mouse moves to do that job! So maybe I've missed something here but if I did; I don't think whatever trick I missed is very evident. If this is how it's done then I guess I'm one of the few working in the preset section of this software otherwise there would have been lots of comments long before now.

I don't mean to be down on the software. You've done great work and I would recommend MFC-Edit to others. You also seem very dedicated to the support of it which is great. I just think the workflow of the software relating to repeating tasks (copy / paste is key) can be improved.

Thanks

I spent some times testing today and I found a bunch of bugs in the MIDI message handling, causing all the problems you describe. I've fixed them - they were hangovers from when I allowed a user-preference to change from Decimal to Hexadecimal editing. I'm now allowing only hexadecimal editing. Fixed a bug in pasting also. Added Copy of both MIDI Message and PC - check the right-click menu for those. Also, removed the Preset number listbox. It caused more problems than it was worth and the spinbox works fine.

I need to perform more testing to make sure its all good and then I'll upload the latest version to the servers. I'll drop a note here when that's done.
Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: 6:50pm CST - Version 8.3 uploaded to servers. Hope I didn't break anything

 

[bwanagary]

Re #2 - Fyi - I am working on a second Dell monitor connected to my Macbook pro. Maybe that has something to do with the crashes when hovering over the preset change arrows in the MFC-101 preset section. I dunno but the program definitely has catastrophic failures intermittently in my environment (I've learned to save frequently).

I have a Macbook Pro with an external Dell monitor also and it has some weird display painting behaviors also, but the apps don't crash. The problem you were seeing was definitely caused by a bug in the Custom MIDI message handling due to leftovers from the decimal/hexadecimal editing preference. Fixed in version 8.3.