Paint Audio Midi Captain question

N

normankrow

New Member
Hello. I have a very general question regarding the midi captain and there is no response from the paint audio customer support and there is no midi captain forum so, thank you for your consideration.

I want to make the midi captain's button led lights toggle on and off with the state of the switch. it absolutely has to be possible but I think it requires some deep deep diving. has anyone gone down this road? I apologize for posting here because it really isn't a fractal question but I don't know where else to turn. thank you so much I will be checking this thread often. cheers. Ron
 
normankrow said:
Hello. I have a very general question regarding the midi captain and there is no response from the paint audio customer support and there is no midi captain forum so, thank you for your consideration.

I want to make the midi captain's button led lights toggle on and off with the state of the switch. it absolutely has to be possible but I think it requires some deep deep diving. has anyone gone down this road? I apologize for posting here because it really isn't a fractal question but I don't know where else to turn. thank you so much I will be checking this thread often. cheers. Ron
Click to expand...
This post would be a better fit for the Other Midi Controllers sub-forum...

What you're asking for is very difficult because of a number of reasons:

  • You have not stated what you expect to control with the switches (presets, scenes, block on/off, block channel, etc)
  • In order to stay completely synced your midi controller would need to have internal code (from the vendor) that knows how to do bi-directional communication with the Fractal including it's midi specification
  • Fractal has many things that can be controlled (see item 1 above for examples
  • All the things that can be controlled can also be changed in various ways on the Fractal itself and the midi controller (without the stuff in item 2) has no way to be aware of
So, this isn't really possible on the controller as far as I'm aware.

You'd need something like an RJM or a Voes controller to do it.
 
In order for this to work, the MIDI Captain would have to me smart enough to ask the Fractal gear whether in item is currently on or off. Most MIDI controllers don’t have the smarts to do that.
 
thank you for chiming in and I am happy to move this to a different sub forum. to be more clear, I am not even controlling a fractal devise. I have the midi captain successfully switching on (and then toggling) the 5 audio loops (busses) from a Morningstar ML5. problem is I can't get the lights on the controller to stay on when the loop is on and go off when it is off. as soon as I go to another button on the controller that button lights up and the previous one goes out. if I hit all 5 buttons I would have 5 loops engaged and a light on the midi captain would be showing me the last one only. I want the controller to look like a mini stomp box pedalboard.

if anyone can advise me I would be over the moon happy but I know I am in a loosely related forum so also any advise as to where I can ask this question would be greatly appreciated too? thank you, Ron.
 
I think you might be looking for "normal" mode for the Midi Captain switches, rather than "select" mode.
Here is a bit from the super mode configuration file I use. The switch is setup to turn LED ON (and send FF) on the first press, and turn LED OFF (and send 00) on the second press. The LED state is independent of all other LEDs. Had I used 'select' mode, the LED state would be grouped with any other switches using 'select' mode, which means only one of the group would be on a given time.

# on/off external 3
[key2]
keytimes = [2]
ledmode = [normal]
ledcolor1 = [0xffff00][0xffff00][0xffff00]
ledcolor2 = [0x000000][0x000000][0x000000]
short_dw1 = [4][CC][42][127]
short_dw2 = [4][CC][42][0]
 
Screenshot 2025-08-05 at 12.22.36 PM.png
wow thank you so much!! I think I can do this. if you wouldn't mind can you show me where I would find access to the fields that you listed? and would I follow your procedure for all 10 switches? this is what I get when I open the midicaptain drive from my desktop. so appreciate you
 
It looks like you have the 10 button version, which seems to have a lot more capability than my 6 button version.

There are three modes that the device can run in, chosen by holding certain switches down when powering up (since you have all three firmware "versions" on the device. (In my case, I installed just the supermode firmware so that's all I have on my device.)

They've tried to create a lot of configuration variations and pages already setup to do things they think might be useful with various devices. This might be valuable, but for me, I wanted some very basic commands, which is why I chose supermode. If your commands are simple and you don't want to use pages (and apparently, presets in your device), supermode might be the easiest to get working.

To setup supermode, I'd suggest editing file "page0" in the "supersetup" directory. Page0 is the first one loaded, so that's all I modified on my device - I only use one page. It should make sense once you study the file and refer to their documentation.

Once the file is edited, boot the device in supermode and you should be able to test your changes. The process can be a bit clunky because if you make a error in the Page0 file the device with crash without providing any useful information so you'll have to scour the file to find your mistake. Once you've got a file that doesn't cause the unit to crash you can test the actual button function to see if you've got what you need. Then repeat the (somewhat painful) process until you've got what you want.

Hope this helps.
 
I have been in the matrix.

I moved all of the fields in page0 key2 to reflect the numbers and letters above (your first post NewWorldMan). I was surprised that there was no "apply" button or "save" etc. when I was finished. I just turned the unit off when I was sure I had it all correct. next is to boot the unit up in supermode. not exactly confirmed how to do this but I think it is hold button3 while powering up. when I do this the screen says. "geek mode 3.0" so looks like that is not it. I try powering on with button 2 held I get the same thing and with button 1 held I get "geek mode usb setup"

a few more things, I never saw the words. (# on/off external 3) anywhere and I didn't have to move ledmode from select to normal, mine already displayed normal.

any other thoughts? I will keep trying to find out how to boot to supermode and I would love to have confirmation that mine has the latest firmware. it seems like it should because it is only 3 weeks old and I bought it new. possibly a bad assumption. the web sight is no help but you are NewWorldMan! thank you again. cheers
 
update. I followed the procedure for uploading firmware 4 then I repeated the steps above then the screen went blank (mostly black with some light around the edges). I then followed instructions from the web sight.

I first tried to turn off anti virus but my new Mac mini m4pro doesn't really have that option. then I tried reformatting the "disc" in quotes because it's the unit that shows up as a disc on the desktop. now the "disk" no longer shows up and the unit is still blank. I doubt I fried it but it is in some purgatory state that I don't understand. I will soldier on and thanks again to nwm. btw the customer support at paint audio is so far a ghost town.
 
Whew, sounds like it's getting deep. I use Windows, so I can't really comment on any Mac things
I don't know that I can be much help, but I will say that I've found the documentation is pretty thorough, though a bit scattered and hard to navigate, so a lot of patience and careful reading is necessary.

I assume you started here, but here's the link where I started.
https://paintaudio.com/products/midi-captain-std-vesion-black

Near the top of that page is a troubleshooting document that you can download that talks about recovering from various conditions. I've not used it, but it seems a reasonable place to start.
 
hey just wanted to report that paint audio customer service did respond to me and they are helping me recover my crashed unit. I can maybe answer "how to recover crashed midi captain" questions if anyone needs. cheers, great community.
 
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