[Rwp] Control Surfaces: I'm about ready to pull my hair out!

[Chris Belle]

it's just too bad that all these DAW makers didn't get together and 
standardized
control surface technology like they did for midi.
The fader port is actually not recommended for sonar, I know this is a 
different issue, but I had a student who had one and pulled his hair out 
trying to get it to work, and we finally got the word from a sweet water 
tech who looked on cakewalk's site and said don't use the fader port for 
sonar.
Now each DAW has a totally different way of handling control surfaces, 
and how much they support or don't support each control surface, and 
which protocol, mackie control, or hui, etc.
It's easy enough to just bind a fader to a control by using the actions 
menu,
but if you try and hand map a lot of things this way, you will most 
definitely run in to conflicts tryin to use raw midi like that.
I think control surfaces are potentially a wonderful technology, but 
they themselves generate more mis-fires, and more why doesn't this work, 
and I tried everything, and this sort of works, but not quite, emails 
than any other topic I've ever seen.
I have been told by some pretty smart folks that reaper's implementation 
of the mackie control surface protocol is not as good as it might be,
but this is only second hand knowledge.
I only use control surface technology in a very casual way, binding a 
fader from a midi control as needed in
some cases, but mostly relying on automation in the DAW itself,
I believe the fader port only has one fader, so you might be constantly 
changing it's assignment unless you want to
be assigning it to
a control which changes
automatically,
as you move tracks.
There are others who know a lot more about surfaces than I do,
I personally think in a lot of ways, they're more trouble than they're 
worth.
Unless you leave   them for specific things, map them, and then leave 
them for jus that purpose.
You wil never, never get a control surface to work the same way across
DAW's,
and if you want to do simple things like mixing volume and fade outs, 
and the like,
reaper offers a lot of easier ways to do those sorts of things.



On 2/16/2016 4:08 AM, Christopher-Mark Gilland wrote:
> Guys, I genuinely hope that no one takes offense to this joke, and if 
> you do, let me preempt my message below by saying I profusely! 
> apologize, but you'd think I just finnished kemo therapy over here, as 
> my hair's all gone after pulling it all out.  No, seriously, here's 
> the situation.
> I have a Presonus Faderport control surface.  I'm not gonna mention 
> names, but a friend of mine actually recommended it for use in Logic 
> Pro X, and ProTools on my mac.  We'll just say that in PT it works 
> great, but everyone else is proving to be disastrous!
> Anyway, I installed the drivers and ran the updated firmware to the 
> unit.  That all went completely smoothely.  In fact, I might have even 
> fixed it where it now works correctly on Logic, but that's neither 
> here nor there.  By the way, I've not proven that totally yet, but I 
> have some suspitions.  Anyway, you can write me off list about that if 
> you want to.
> Anyhow, back to Reaper, I went after installing the drivers/firmware 
> update and popped open Reaper.  BTW, I just downloaded the most up to 
> date installer last night, so I know it's totally updated.  that isn't 
> the issue.  Anyway, I went into Reaper, hit CTRL+P, went down in the 
> tree view to Control Surfaces, clicked on add, and selected the 
> Presonus Faderport, then hit OK.  Then I closed the preferences.
> Now, nothing's working on the surface from within Reaper.  I can get 
> it to work perfectly all day long in ProTools on my mac, but not in 
> Reaper on my Windows XP machine.
> I've literally just spent the last hour and a half Googling, and 
> reading forum thread after forum thread to absolutely no ends, and 
> have come up empty handed every dawg gone time.
> I've uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers, I've reflashed the 
> firmware several times, I've unplugged and replugged both the USB and 
> the power cord.  It's not a USB cable going bad issue, as again, it 
> works fine in PT 12.4 extremely rock solidly.
> I've tried moving the motorized fader, I've tried my transport buttons 
> like play/stop, absolutely nothing!  I even went so far as to try 
> isolating the problem to see if it was an XP issue, or maybe the fact 
> I'm running X86 hardware, and not X64, but that isn't the case.  I 
> tried on my Windows 10 laptop, which normally, I'd not use for 
> recording, but just for the hell of it, I did try, and even over 
> there, with UAC disabled, and me having full root admin access, it 
> still! didn't work.
> Yes, I did hit applications key, and try running Reaper as 
> Administrator, and yes, I have tried installing the Faderport again by 
> running as Administrator. It should already be doing that by default, 
> but just in case, I wanted to be sure.  No go.
> I looked in the pdf manual to the Faderport, but I see absolutely 
> nothing! zilch!  Nada!  That says anything about it not working in 
> Windows, let alone! in Windows XP.
> In fact, lots of my Google searches are turning up people who 
> apparently have done it just fine on XP Pro SP3, which is precisely 
> what I'm using with JAWS 15.  Yes, I do have NVDA as well, not that 
> that matters.
> I'm totally out of options.  I honest to God don't know what the heck 
> is left to try.  I don't exactly need! a control surface with Reaper, 
> but it sure would make my mixing way way easier!
> Chris.
>
>
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