How do I?... and other general questions

[qbrd]

Hello,

I received my controller yesterday and I am so excited! I was able to easily plug it in, map it to controls, and start twisting knobs!

But now I have so many questions! Here’s a start…

• How do I turn all the lights on? I’d really prefer not to click 200 individual buttons…
• How do I set the “color state” of a button? E.g.: if a control is off I want the pad to be red. If it’s on I want the pad to be green? Seems like the LED is always off if the button is “off”. Ableton has three states for Monitoring, “in”, “auto”, and “off”, I want the button to change color based on which state it’s in…
• Is there a way to do a “gradient” on the encoders? E.g. have the low values light up blue and the high values light up pink?
• How do you select between banks? I get that you need to set controls up as the “selector”… The docs just say “select which components to use as a selector”… But that’s a tautological statement… (found this bank setup doc, but I don’t understand how that selects which keys to select which bank… maybe I’m just not groking what I’m reading.)
• Along the same lines, how do you setup a “shift key”. E.g. when I push a button I want it to toggle a thing. But if I hold another button and push the same button, I want it to toggle a different thing…
• How do I setup my encoders to send different messages? e.g.: When the encoder is just by itself I want to be able to turn it to say adjust a filter, but then I want to be able to push it in and while holding it in turn it to adjust, say the resonance of the same filter (or a different filter for that matter). Basically, I want my encoders to work like the MIDI Fighter Twister.
• Is the .ylt save file standard documented anywhere? Looks like it’s just a big ol’ JSON structure.

I know I have a million more questions, but I think this answers the big ones!

Thanks!

[qbrd]

This video: https://youtu.be/JGgqlajgV0U?t=216

Sort of answers this question:

How do I setup my encoders to send different messages?

but it seems to be a hard toggle. Is there a way to do it as a momentary/instantaneous toggle? So adjust pan when holding the button down, otherwise adjust volume?

[Ale]

Hello, qbrd! Welcome to the forum!

I will get back to this and answer all the other questions you have posted before.

But regarding the last one:
The last section on the encoder configuration is “switch behavior”, in there you have “switch mode” select the “momentary” option from the drop-down menu.

Momentary option for encoder switches

[Ale]

Let’s go one by one:

• How do I turn all the lights on? I’d really prefer not to click 200 individual buttons…

  • We don’t have a way to do that on Kilowhat, but it’s possible to do it with Ableton. Just use midi to turn them all on. I will make a Midi Rack for this in ableton and share with you here.

• How do I set the “color state” of a button? E.g.: if a control is off I want the pad to be red. If it’s on I want the pad to be green? Seems like the LED is always off if the button is “off”. Ableton has three states for Monitoring, “in”, “auto”, and “off”. I want the button to change color based on which state it’s in…

  • Short answer: This isn’t possible straight away with only the controller. The buttons have 2 states. What you can do, if you use the “Value to color” mode for the feedback of the buttons, is to set up a remote script (for example using Remotify) to send different messages to the controller when it detects the state of these buttons in Ableton. You could send any values for the “In”, “Auto” and “Off” states, and the buttons with light up to the color corresponding to the value you selected. The “value to color” map is in this image.

• Is there a way to do a “gradient” on the encoders? E.g. have the low values light up blue and the high values light up pink?

  • This is a nice idea, right now it’s not possible. I will add this one as a feature request.

• How do you select between banks? I get that you need to set controls up as the “selector”… The docs just say “select which components to use as a selector 1”… But that’s a tautological statement… (found this bank setup doc, but I don’t understand how that selects which keys to select which bank… maybe I’m just not groking what I’m reading.)

  • To set up a bank in Kilowhat:
    • Click on the “Banks” icon to open the bank configuration
    • Click on the “+”, a new bank will appear, or the “Copy to bank” icon to duplicate the bank’s configuration in the new bank.
    • Open the “Button:” drop-down. At this point, you can select a number corresponding to the card ID or enable the AUTO-SELECT feature on the general settings and press “Capture”. Now, pressing an encoder switch or a button it’ll automatically set the right ID. You can choose momentary or toggle mode for this bank. If you choose momentary, the bank will shift only while you are pressing the button, and with the toggle mode, the bank will remain selected until you shift to a new one again.
      
      

• Along the same lines, how do you setup a “shift key”. E.g. when I push a button I want it to toggle a thing. But if I hold another button and push the same button, I want it to toggle a different thing…

  • This one is the same as the one before but using the bank in momentary mode. (note: in kilowhat shifts and banks are the same thing). You can set different messages to the same button in different banks.

• How do I set up my encoders to send different messages? e.g.: When the encoder is just by itself I want to be able to turn it to say adjust a filter, but then I want to be able to push it in and while holding it in turn it to adjust, say the resonance of the same filter (or a different filter for that matter). Basically, I want my encoders to work like the MIDI Fighter Twister.

  • This one is sorted out

• Is the .ylt save file standard documented anywhere? Looks like it’s just a big ol’ JSON structure.

  • Copy the contents of the json file to a parser like this one http://json.parser.online.fr/ . This will arrange the fields and values of the file in a readable manner, and if you see a parameter you want to change, you can look it up in the file and edit it. Be careful to not modify the structure of the file (don’t delete any characters like commas, brackets, etc.

I hope it helps.

[qbrd]

Huge!

Ok, I have some work to do, but this sets me on the right path!

The buttons have 2 states.

Hmm… I guess that answers my question about the encoders being able to toggle between 3/4/16! different controls, like each time you toggle it it switches to a different control. (or even like a click/double click situation…)

Thanks a ton for the answers! I knew it was something obvious I was missing with the banks!

I’m sure I’ll be back with more questions!

[qbrd]

@Ale

The buttons have 2 states.

Is there a way to change that?

Like, if I want:

<customBool>
  <True>
    red
  </True>
  <false>
    blue
  </false>
  <File_not_Found>
    green
  </File_not_Found>
</customBool>

Edit: Actually, (I’ve spent way too long on this joke…) it should be JSON, right?

{
  "customBool": {
    "True": "red",
    "false": "blue",
    "File_not_Found": "orange"
  }
}

}

[qbrd]

This one is the same as the one before but using the bank in momentary mode. (note: in kilowhat shifts and banks are the same thing). You can set different messages to the same button in different banks.

Ahhhhh!

Ok, so if I have button 32 and 33 set to toggle bank 1 and 2, then I could have banks 3 and 4 setup in “momentary” mode and then I could hold buttons 32 or 33 to activate those “modes”?

[Ale]

Sadly nop, any given button/switch can be associated with (only) one bank, and there will be the same in every other bank. So you can´t have a button that is bank 1 when set to momentary and bank 2 when set to toggle.

What I meant before is that buttons o anything else (that are not set as Banks) can have completely different configs in every other bank.

I hope that makes sense…
Let me know if I have addressed the point you were making.

[qbrd]

Hmm…

'Cause what I was really wanting was to have a button I could push and then ALL of the buttons become bank selectors, where in a “standard” bank there would be no “bank selector” buttons.

[Ale]

Ah! I see.
Like a “metashifter”. So the idea is to use or only “loose” one button to access all possible banks. I can see how can be useful.

Would you mind adding this to the feature request section of the forum? That way, it’s easier for us to follow up. Thanks!

[qbrd]

Alright, I created

Make "Bank Selector" based on switch "State" rather than switch itself

Hello, I’d like to be able to assign buttons 1-8 to do a thing. Then be able to hold button 9 and use buttons 1-8 to select through banks 1-8. Maybe hold button 9 and push encoder 1 in will select bank 9. IDEALLY: while holding button 9, button 10-X can do different things too, not just change bank.

Not sure I’m quite happy with my description, but I think it gets the point across