Guide to midi out and lighting LED’s for Traktor & VCI-100?
hey
Have been messing about trying to get my head around the LED control in tractor. Basically as a very simple test case I wanna change the LED states on my VCI so that, within the 2.3 mapping, when I press play on a deck the play button stays blue, and when it stops play it goes back to green, just to give me an easy visual feedback of what deck is playing from the VCI surface as well as the lappy screen.
Then once i get my head around it i’ll probably make some more in depth changes to go along with the LED colour changing article on the main page.
I could only really find one thread that went into controlling the LED’s in any depth, and the main thing i got from it was that the suggested way was to have the button in question also change a modifier state from 0 to 1, and then have the LED output triggered of that change. Then when the button is off the 1 changes back to 0 and the button goes back to normal.
However with so many functions available in Ean’s mapping it looks as if the majority of the modifiers are already used for stuff. Is there other ways to do it.
Ideally what i’m looking for is if there is a guide someone can point me too that will explain the whole thing.
Actually in Ean’s latest mapping you can reup two modifiers (5 and 6).
Also in Traktor Pro 1.2 you will essentially have unlimited modifiers, however there are some issues that come with this as well. I havent tried the second beta to see if these have been resolved yet. Things are moving thou.
Of course with bome MIDI translator you can do all of that without the limitations of traktor.
Mostly controlling LEDs using Traktor Pro’s mapping is pretty simple.
In your ‘play button’ example all you have to do is map the play command a second time to the same button, but this time, its type is ‘output’. Then, if the main play command is set to ‘toggle’, the LED on the button will turn on and off as you press it. You dont need modifiers at all.
That in essence is it. Most of the other settings don’t need to be touched, but are easily understood with a quick flick through the traktor manual.
yeah i tried that but couldn’t get it to work somehow, all it kept doing was turning blue while i was pressing the button, but then going off again as soon as I took my finger away, just like it does normally. Will mess about with it again today.
And can it be as simple as that? While that was my first thought and the one I messed about with first, I kind of started to thing well what would happen if i pressed cue to stop the playback instead of the play/pause button or if the track just finished and stopped of its own accord. Would the blue light on the play button go back off then? Wouldn’t the lighting of the LED need to be tied to the ‘play state’ (i.e. playing or not playing) so to speak rather than just the pressing of the button that play is mapped to? Or am i over complicating things?
Ahh.. I think I know what your problem is.
The buttons on the bottom of the unit interact differently with traktor. I think this was because of the original button layout.
Originally, from left to right, the buttons are play/pause, cue/play,cue/pause, set cue.
I know in Ean’s mappings the play button has moved to the other end.
However.. in the original layout, the play button does light up as I described in the post above. I think the cue/pause button does too, but the cue/play and set cue buttons merely flash.
You’ll have to ask Vestax why they did that! Its one of the many quirks on the unit, but its all good
And yes.. it IS as simple as that In answer to your query.. if for example, the track stopped playing, then yes, the LED would go out automatically, because its mapped to the play command, and traktor is smart enough to send an appropriate signal.
The same thing happens if you use the mouse to turn off a playing track for example.
