As stated by the OP in this thread - and by Roland's marketing pages, ACT configuration should be straightforward. For me, not so much. I followed the basic instructions for configuring ACT - in preferences > control surfaces.
In Port: A-PRO 2
Out Port: A-PRO
ACT, WAI boxes: checked
WAI color: (why not?) green
In Utilities the named controller shows up. On the list of presets, I do not find a Roland A300. There is an entry for an Edirol 300/500/800 which is the predecessor of the Roland-branded board, but those presets do not work.
Just to verify, yes, I checked the "Active Controller Technology" checkbox in the lower left of the Utilities > Controller dialogue, and yes, I activated the blue "act" button in the upper right corner of the dialogue. And, yes, I activated the physical act button on the Roland board. It lights up orange.
I see evidence that something is happening. In Sonar LE, (which I installed before upgrading the Roland's kit DAW to Artist) I see pixels light up at the top and bottom of sliders when I push a controller button. In Artist, not much, but it does show the spinning wheel every few seconds when "act" is activated on the board - and the green WAI bands are present around the tracks. (remember, I picked green in the preferences dialogue)
The basic test I try is to use the transport buttons. Nothing. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I strongly believe the idea with ACT and transport buttons is that those buttons act as physical surrogates for the transport buttons in the DAW.
I can imagine other controls could be a mystery, so I stuck to the transport buttons for basic config testing. If they don't work out of the box with the provided DAW, as Roland suggested, I don't want to go further into configuring custom setups. Not yet.
Okay, so maybe I missed something. I did install A-Pro editor. I found Cakewalk Control Surface plugins on the Cakewalk site and used the provided .exe installer (Windows)
I checked that I had installed the A300 drivers from Rolands site. Check.
I found some A-Pro series preset control maps on the Roland downloads page. Nothing in there for Sonar. I found the A-Pro Control Surface Plugin for Sonar on Roland's download page. Installed it.
I see a Shared Control Surfaces directory in my Program files > Cakewalk directory. I see an A-Pro .dll in there.
Not sure what I'm missing. I would expect to find Roland A-Pro presets among the long list of presets on the Utilities > ACT Midi Controller dialogue.
It gets worse. I abandoned any interest in presets and ACT for a few days and just used my new board. And another board from another maker - with no DAW controllers.
When I turn off ACT on the Roland board, it no longer works for whatever soft synths I have installed. The other board continues to play songs, as it were, but whatever soft synth was listening to the Roland goes silent. Switch input to omni or the other board and the other board works. I usually have to shut down Sonar, and restart. I think one time or two I had to unplug the USB cable to the Roland board, restart Sonar and plug the Roland A-PRO in again before it would recognize keyboard notes again.
I contacted both Roland and Cakewalk with my allowed 2,000 character support request, but it probably takes more than 24 hours for either for them to respond, which is how long it's been (well 20, but close enough - one business day)
This is not right. Could be something wrong with the board, but there's got to be a way to test that. I could start configuring the board with the A-Pro editor but I'm wary, not having first seen a stable configuration from the manufacturers who imply the board and DAW have at least some basic transport pairing with ACT.
I concur with earlier reports that the documentation is abysmal. I've seen references to .mid, .spp and .xml files as protocols for storing control configurations. I've seen references to a vast pool of information about Midi CC numbering conventions available via a google search. Closest I got to something relevant was that Sonar's transport buttons are somewhere between 58 and 63. For eight buttons. Six numbers. I'm not ready to start editing in A-Pro with not much more than that to start with.
Admittedly, I'm new to Midi but have more than a little programming and IT experience. Give me a reasonable starting place and I usually study, learn and explore my way into a technology, which I'm confident I can do with Midi control surfaces. In this case, the reasonable starting place - the safe configuration to which I can return if all else fails while I'm learning - is not there.
Any ideas?