Hey...

I recently got an Editrol PCR-800 with all the fancy knobs and sliders and buttons and whatnot. Immediately, it appeals to me that the ACT preset sets the Slider 9 to be a control of the First Bus, or however it migically k new to use that which I call "Master". At any rate, that's great, but I also use that master bus to decide if I'm going to hear from headphones or Monitors. I have to switch the master output from 1-2 to 3-4 to switch (in my case they have the friendly names of Headphones and Monitors, respectively.

I'd like to set up some control that will let me quickly switch between those two so I don't have to have the master bus displayed all the time and I can confidently switch between phones and Monitors and control the volume.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

You could set the bus output to "none" and use 2 sends instead, one set to main-out 1-2, the other to 3-4.

There seems to be no way to toggle send on/off via ACT. You can control the level of one send and group it with the other to crossfade, although it seems not to work very well regarding the level ranges. Also, you'd have to set ACT to "Channel strip" in order to control multiple sends with one rotaries bank. And you always need to switch ACT control from tracks to buses.

I think the easiest way would be to use remote control. Enable one send and set up remote for both sends with the same controller/button on your PCR. The button will then toggle the send-enable with each press. HTH

werner

I'm not sure if act can control the mute button, but if it can, I used to do this....

Create two master busses......one routed to ur monitors and one to your headphones. Then place a send on one of them, enable it, and put the volume of the send at 0 i think. Also should be pre-fader? (its either pre or post, try both). Now, put the mute button each bus into a group. Then, go into that groups properties, and make them relative to each other. This way, every time you mute one of the busses, the other one will unmute and vice versa.

If you can find a way for act to control this, it should work just as you want it to.

Thanks for the ideas...keep 'em coming. I'm going to seee what I can put together with this info so far tomorrow.

I had thought about the idea of using sends, which is just as good, just a little different, but I hadn't thought of the remote option for toggling the enables on them, one starting in "on" position, so to create an always one on one off...anyway - I'll take a look in the morning how this will work.

Ok - so I got a chance to play around with this and I got it to almostwork as suggested by Dreamkeeper's last paragraph.

So I went into the ACT options for the PCR, and made sure that button A8 was excluded from ACT so that I could assign a note to it - the controller 80 value that's the default there, at least in the map that is loaded here (0) outside of the DNAP mode, was not working in that it only worked while I held down the button. So I assigned a note to it and set the two buses enables to the same note number as a trigger, and started them opposite-selected of one another.

When I click between the two sends turning one off and the other on, the sound goes from bus to bus as I would expect, but when I hit the A8 (toggle) button, the lights on the tracks SHOW that the buses have switched, but nothing happens with the routing of the sound on the bus.

What the?

And here's another frustration. I tried setting only one with the remote control and then doing them as a "group" as well and doing the when one is 0 an, the other is 1, and vice-versa at the Group Manager level - behaves the same way as setting both for the same remote control command.

I also tried grouping the volumes in an inverse relationship and setting them to go value 0-101 (which makes the top end 0.0db), but whichever one of the two volume sliders gets the remote control (in this case cc:16) will always go from -inf to +6.0, regardless of what I set the value to - and then it would be back to trying to get the Edirol to even hold onto the custom control changes (it was a little flaky on wanting to hold onto the button/pad being a note number when in DNAP mode, sometimes just dropping back to cc:80), and in this case it would be a rotary, and then I would have to exclude the whole bank of rotaries from ACT, since they don't allow the option on a per-knob basis.

I hate these sorts of "almost there" issues.

Ok - by updating the R8 to only allow values from 0-101, remote controlling one of the two send levels with that controller, and setting both send levels to a group with an inverse relation between their values, (0-101 and 101-0), it works. I'll be interested to see which thing I do that screws up the controller value being kept at the keyboard itself.

And another update - so I found that it being on that rotary, and still under ACT control, as well as a "remote control" it was doing double-duty. It just so happens that in "multichannel-rotary mode" there is nothing assigned to Rotary 8, and there is a button (B1) that is a toggle between Channel Strip Mode and Multi-channel mode. So I can hit the toggle, turn the rotary all the way to one direction or the other and hear sound from only there.

Works...but it's weird. I want the button thing to work - again, shows on screen that the status of the busses are changing, but doesn't affect an actual audio change unless clicked with the mouse. Grr.

shows on screen that the status of the busses are changing, but doesn't affect an actual audio change unless clicked with the mouse.

Yeah, seems to be a bug - the remote command is getting lost somewhere. Bummer! I didn't test with audio running, sorry.

So far the only option that works is the crossfade thing - a bit tedious though.


EDIT: Oh my! I'm getting really old:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/fb.asp?m=1038208

yeah - well that's a bummer of a bug that seems pretty fixable, eh? Oh well, it's not critical, even just having the master volume on a dedicated slider is pretty handy, though if this volume crossfade between the two continues to work, it'll be a fine workaround until this (hopefully) gets fixed. Would also be nice to maybe use that crossfade slider for this - will have to see if that can be taken off the pan function.