Hapax stops when slaved from a DAW and the DAW has a loop point

I have just contacted Support about this, but just wondered if anyone had seen this, or if I’m being stupid and missing something.

Hapax is slaved off my DAW (Reaper) via USB, and the Sync In Clock Source is set to USB Device, and MIDI Start Stop set to On (tried both settings - if it’s set to Off then Hapax doesn’t start)

If I’ve set a loop point in my project on Reaper, as soon as the loop restarts, Hapax stops running, and I have to completely stop Reaper and restart to get Hapax to run again.

Perhaps check if Reaper sends midi clock or midi time code? (You don’t want the latter.)

Perhaps use a midi monitor to check what actually is sent form Reaper at the loop point?

Yeah, I checked both those things for the bug report:

It sends MIDI Clock (and my Pyramid works fine in exactly the same setup)

MIDI monitor clears when Hapax stops. Not sure if that’s a symptom of the problem or not.

Have you had a look (with a midi monitor on your computer) at what Reaper is sending?

I just played with this with Ableton Live, and Live doesn’t really work with loop points and external clocks “properly”

in Ableton, If you set a loop point , basically it doesn’t send a MIDI START
it only ever sends a MIDI START, if you have the play position at 1.1.1 and hit play.

so really, the Hapax can do nothing :frowning: (*) as it never gets told to start.

(*) obviously something different here, as Hapax does NOT crash/stop responding, it just simply does not start the play head. if as you say Hapax is crashing, it would be good to get a midi log from your computer to see exactly what was sent to the hapax that it didn’t like.

anyway, in the case of Live, unfortunately is not a Hapax ‘bug’…

I think the only ‘solution’ in this case, would be for Hapax to allow for a manual start of the transport… but of course, that would require the user to ‘manually’ sync.

this has ability to always control transport on Hapax, has already been put forward as a Feature Request.
similarly, the transport not being able to be started with MIDI start/stop = OFF has also been reported as a bug,

I guess we could test with other DAWs, as I suspect they probably all act a bit different in this area.


EDIT:

a couple of other bits

a) if Im slave to live, and have transport running… so hapax is running fine.
as soon, as I tell live to go into a loop point, it sends a STOP to hapax, and never restarts :frowning:

b) workaround - use hapax as master
unfortunately, only workaround I found was to slave Live to Hapax, then Hapax runs transports and within Live can select loop points, and it doesn’t complain.

Hey,

Been chatting with Squarp, and it’s sort of a bug. Basically Reaper is sending a Stop, then a Continue message, rather than Start. (It also sends a Song Position Point message, but this is less important)#

Hapax didn’t know what to do with the Continue, but will in future treat it as another type of Start message (which I think it was Pyramid did)

Got another weird problem now, where if I reset Reaper to play from the start whilst it’s already playing (which sends Stop and then Start) Hapax gets the Start message first, and then the Stop. I have my Pyramid plugged in as well, and according to the MIDI monitor on that it gets Stop before Start. So that’s an odd one. But I’ve reported this to Squarp as well, so hopefully they’ll get to the bottom of it.

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I did wonder about CONTINUE…
but for some weird reason, Live doesn’t appear to send CONTINUE… but Im pretty sure it used to !
(not sure if this changed between live 10->11 ?! or something else weird is going on here)

as you say, CONTINUE is often treated as an alternative to START.
of course, the issue is, its all going to be a bit ‘limited’, since as soon as you start moving the transport position around, the ‘sync’ is gone to some extent… thats just a limitation of MIDI CLOCK vs using time code (which has its own issues ;))

but for sure its better than nothing or crashing :wink:

Yeah, the sync is never ‘perfect’ (although the sync is never perfect from computers to hardware at any time, I generally find) but them’s the breaks, I guess. I unfortunately have no other way of syncing up audio and MIDI without using a computer.

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Have you considered syncing your daw to Hapax instead? I don´t know Reaper, but Ableton and Bitwig can do this.

This is all fixed now. Should be in the next firmware.

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