#49

Hello!

Is there any way to have Ansible remember which midi mode it was last in between power cycles/usb connections.

I’m using the 4 voice mode w/ a KM Boppad and it defaults back to the standard midi mode every time the %@$?#!!! micro USB gets temporarily disconnected.

Any help would be appreciated.
M

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#50

I don’t know if this will do exactly what you want but the MIDI mode has had the ability to store a single configuration preset for some time - see the preset section of ansible midi docs.

If that doesn’t do want you are looking for I can investigate deeper.

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#51

oh awesome. I’ll try that!!

#52

I noticed in the docs that the arpeggiator has some kind of Euclidean fill algorithms, and some Teletype ops to configure them. The docs say very little about it though (including how to even engage this mode). Is there a forum post somewhere with more details? My search revealed nothing.

It sounds pretty neat.

#53

ah, good catch! this info is in the Ansible + Teletype MIDI section. I’ll add a quick note to the page you landed on to reference this chart!

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#54

I don’t know how long I’ve had an Ansible. At least a year, maybe more. I’ve completely ignored the MIDI arpeggiator. “Another arpeggiator”, I thought. “Meh,” my brain told me.

So I tried it out today. Don’t know why I thought a monome arpeggiator would be mundane. I should have known better by now.

It’s awesome! A four voice, user-definable, Euclidean-timed, arpgeggiator that turns a little 25-key keyboard into a algorithmic modular orchestra! This thing is a blast - very interactive… And I was just doing some live commands from the Teletype - didn’t even get into further automating it with scripts and such.

So just dropping a line for anyone who, like me, has mistakenly ignored this ansible app. You probably should check it out.

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#55

Much time has passed but I thought I’d mention another device which (so far) appears plays well with the ansible MIDI mode and that is the iConnectivity mio2. I had picked one up as a companion for norns but then realized that it might work well with ansible directly.

I’ve just confirmed the following setup works:

  • mio2 usb 2 (marked “power in”) connected to ansible
  • mio2 usb 1 connected to iPad (in my case an old iPad Air with a lighting to usb-a adaptor)

Launch Fugue machine, set all four playheads to send mid to “mio2 usb 2”, with each playhead set to channel 1-4 accordingly.

One particularly nice thing about this setup is that the iPad (or norns) isn’t providing power to the mio2 so it doesn’t need to be plugged in and the iPad can also send/receive MIDI from the two DIN ports on the back of the mio2 as well.

A simple setup which I have found fun which doesn’t even involve the ER stuff is:

  • CV1 as pitch to voice (possibly with some slew)
  • TR2 (i.e. the 1/2 rate voice trigger) to an envelope long enough to hear the pitch change in CV1
  • Send the voice to a delay like the 4ms DLD and drive the ansible clock input from the DLD
  • Stick the arp into hold mode and try experiment

Things get more interesting using a gate sequencer to drive the ansible/arp clock and/or mix+shift combinations of the other CV outs and use as modulation…

If you have any sound examples of using the ER clocking feature I’d be curious to hear them!

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#56

Does your setup provide power to the iPad, or only midi?

Thanks.

#57

No the iPad is not being powered, it is running off its internal battery. Only the mio2 is being powered by ansible. If you need the iPad to be powered as well (and you have an iPad with a lightning connector) then this adaptor would allow you to connect both a USB device and a power adaptor to the iPad.

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#58

hey everyone

i’m having difficulty using ansible in midi voice mode. it seems like the cv signal its putting out is way higher than what i’m playing. a few octaves above and really sharp. around octave 0 it gets as close as i can get it and thats still a whole step above and really sharp and it only “tracks” for about an octave.

ive tried sending notes in to it in mono voice mode ( pressing key two once ) using ableton (mio usb to midi cable) octatrack ( also mio usb to midi cable) and op1 ( usb cable ). they are all behaving similarly. any ideas ?

#59

The MIDI mode does have a global pitch offset to help deal with the unipolar CV outputs. From the docs:

The default pitch offset is -2 octaves which is the equivalent of issuing the following Teletype command MID.SHIFT N -24 .

…if you have a TT connected you could see if running MID.SHIFT 0 -24 to see if that helps. IIRC the pitch offset is stored as part of the single ansible MIDI preset.

#60

oh okay. i dont have a teletype. is there any way to change this feature some other way?

i messed around and even taking the offset in to consideration, the pitch is extremely sharp. using ableton in to ansible, i sent a seqeunce out of octave 0-1 and indeed it came out of octave 3-4 but was very sharp. so i used a the pitch bend automation lane to “tune” the midi data and that seemes to be a good eough work around. the only problem is the first “C” in octave 0-1 is still sharp.

i am just trying to use ansible to feed a scale in to marbles. i figured out a work around for now though it juts makes me worried i’m doing something wrong. seems like one should be able to simply plug in a midi keyboard ( like an op1) and get a simple midi to cv converter correct?

#61

Do you have a volt meter or some other way to read the CV output level? If so I’d suggest trying to confirm that the output voltage is increasing by +1 volt for each octave you go up on the keyboard. If it doesn’t seem to be tracking to +1 volt something could be going wrong hardware wise.

The global offset is only settable via teletype but that also means it is highly unlikely that it is set to some odd offset (unless your ansible was used and it was set by someone else).

What is the oscillator you are driving?

Is there any chance you have really old firmware - pre v1.4? IIRC the two octave offset was added in v1.4. If there are any funky settings stored in flash you could try re-flashing the firmware to basically get it back to factory settings.

#62

thank for your help. yeah i have an es8 so il use the osciliscope in there to check things out.

my ansible is indeed used so we shall see.

how do i know what firmware i’m on ? if things seem wrong when i check the voltage output then maybe il try flashing the firmware. honestly feel a little over my head here but il try.

#63

Prior to v2.0.0, there’s not really a way to figure this out other than the presence / absence of certain features. As of 2.0.0 you can back up Ansible’s stored presets to a JSON file by inserting a USB disk – this file will contain the firmware version near the top of the file.

Incidentally, this is a way you could modify things like MIDI settings without a Teletype: dump a JSON backup to disk, edit the file on a computer (this part is… not remotely user friendly, but I can advise), then reload the edited backup onto Ansible.

If you have a grid and are used to using Kria, here are some indications of what version you’re on:

  • I believe trigger ratcheting, alt notes, and glide settings were introduced in 1.6.1.
  • In 2.0.0, Kria’s octave page will have 5 keys lit in the top-left corner of the grid, for a track-wide octave shift.
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#64

Interested in getting feedback from anyone who uses Ansible midi mode a lot, and in particular anyone who’s used the Teletype MID.SHIFT op to adjust the base note used by the midi pitch calculation. After investigating with @wolfgangschaltung (discussion here) we came to the realization that if you perform custom tuning/calibration on the Ansible side to correct for DAC offsets and tracking, then the 2 octave global pitch shift is not correct and results in midi pitches being out of tune relative to the other modes.

My question I think is: is it necessary for MID.SHIFT to allow you to give a sub-semitone offset, or would it be okay to quantize this value to semitones? This would allow applying the 2 octave shift as an offset into the semitone -> pitch CV lookup table, rather than an adjustment at the DAC level, so it would respect a user-customized tuning table. If this is acceptable, I think the best thing to do for backward-compatibility and avoiding any issues with existing flashed values is to keep the Teletype syntax as-is, but Ansible would quantize these values to the nearest semitone when determining the appropriate midi offset.

#65

I think it would be fine to quantize to semitones.

The feature was added specifically to help people who were finding it difficult to tune their oscillators to as low a pitch as they wanted when the MIDI note range was mapped directly to the unipolar 0-10V output range of the DAC. The default -2V shift seemed about right for the mangrove when testing.

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#66

Does/can ansible send a clock to the attached midi device? Midi fighter twister has an interesting sequencer but needs to receive a clock to run.

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#67

IIRC it does not send MIDI clock out. MIDI clock in will pulse the internal arpeggiator and toggle one of the TR outputs in some modes but that is it I believe.

#68

I finally got a SevillaSoft midi to midi gizmo, and it let me hook up the excellent iOS Fugue Machine to Ansible in the quad midi mode…

Sublime!

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