Hey there.
I was wondering, since it is possible to export a single page as sysex, could there be some way to generate a midi file to sysex conduit and squirt ideas straight into pages? Currently I play more complex stuff in from Cubase and clear the STA map. My dream would be a tight VST plugin integration of the Octopus.....I'm sure you guys have enough to do though as is....
Hi,
I had spent a lot of time working with this idea about 8 years ago. I wanted to build a feature set for the Octopus to allow a DAW to continuously control the Octopus, adding in new pages, etc. Ultimately, I dropped the project because MIDI 1.1 has some serious limitations in regard to start/stop/pause/resume. The issue wasn't the Octopus. I was able to create the concept of a song cursor and was able to move forward, rewind, loop, etc. The problem was with all of my other equipment. My synths, drum machines, etc., really didn't respond well to the concept of an arbitrary MIDI loop at any point in a song. What happens when your loop starts in the middle of a drone pad, such that the pad note hasn't been played yet? Eventually work in this area was abandoned.
The event model that I built in v4.0 will allow your DAW to do things like mute tracks, delete a page, and move pages in the grid. The idea was to use the bottom row as a space to load new pages, then have the DAW move the page somewhere else, mute an old page and unmute the new page. This code is still in the codebase, it's just disabled with a feature flag.
For anyone curious, I broke away from the DAW entirely after watching some videos by Junkie XL and reading some blogs by some dubstep producers. I now use multiple sequencers and multiple samplers with the Octopus at the center. A recording is done the old fashioned way, as you would do in a recording studio with a band. Record almost everything, play live, keep the best parts, and stitch a song together in sections.
