hapaxOS 1.10 RC - Looking for beta test volunteers

Very happy with the updates. The Hapax is starting to show its potential!

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Heads up! I had some trouble with my instrument definition file when it was named ob6.txt - the Hapax simply didn’t find the file.
Renaming the file to obsix.txt fixed it.

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i would love to see what yours looks like. would you mind posting it? i tried to make a simple one for my rev2 and twice it gave me a “NO INST DEF FOUND” error message.

Coming from the pyramid I’m familiar with the idea, but something small can easily trip you up. Happy to hear they seem relatively easy to create for you though.

my rev2 did the same but changing it to revtwo didnt help

Certainly - here is my instrument definition for Vermona DRM1MKIII … (I’m not sure if ‘Version 1’ needs to be there):

VERSION 1

TRACKNAME DRM1-MKIII

TYPE DRUM

OUTPORT USBD

OUTCHAN 2

INPORT ALLACTIVE

INCHAN ALL

[DRUMLANES]
8:NULL:02:10 OPEN HH2
7:NULL:02:08 CLOSE HH2
6:NULL:02:05 CLAP
5:NULL:02:04 SNARE
4:NULL:02:14 OPEN HH1
3:NULL:02:12 CLOSE HH1
2:NULL:02:01 DRUM1
1:NULL:02:00 KICK
[/DRUMLANES]

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Thanks, this helped a ton. I made a def file for my Rev2 with CCs and assignments and it worked great. I was making another for my drum machine but I didn’t copy and paste yours, just referred to it closely. The interesting thing is it didn’t work right away so I did end up copy and pasting yours. It worked fine but then I wanted to know what was wrong. So I took your def file that I copied and changed the info a couple lines at a time in an attempt to find the snag. Interestingly enough the problem was the file name. it is now apparent that txt file must be greater than 3 characters or the Hapax won’t find it. My drum machine is called QD… go figure.

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I don’t know if maybe instrument defs deserve a separate thread, but I’d just ask here if they’re on a fixed midi channel.

In other words, if I have a multipart synth i have to create various definition files with different midi channels and load them accordingly, or I can create one single definition file and swap midi channel to play the part I need on the fly.

Hope all this make sense :sweat_smile:

Yeah, you can set the MIDI channel to NULL.

Also you can change the channel after loading the Def.

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Is there an explanation of how MATCH CHORDS works? I see “TRSP track can now be used to constrain all notes to a chord” in the firmware update text, but I don’t see any mention in the manual.

Make sure you are looking at the beta manual. Theres 3 sections about the transpose tracks stuff including chord matching at the bottom of the page about projects, including some nice colourful diagrams.

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The Match Chord feature looks interesting, but it seems like it’s geared towards people programming the sequencer and not playing live. I’d like to be able to quantize notes in one or more tracks to chords being played on an arbitrary track, eg. a track with synth pad, or a track with a piano sound, whether that track has a pattern being looped or it’s being played live.

From what I can tell here, I’d have to both record my piano chords on the piano track, then either re-record the same chords on track 16, but without any gaps between chords, or duplicate the piano pattern onto track 16 and then edit it to remove gaps between chords.

This doesn’t seem practical or fun to me, and it doesn’t seem like it’ll allow me to just play arbitrary chords without recording them and live-quantize other tracks.

Please correct me if I’ve missed something here, like if there’s some way to “link” track 16 to another track so that it follows that track’s live input and/or playing pattern.

Loving the new Math operators. The /X:X ones are really useful for making sequences more complex and allows for building some sequences that are effectively much longer than 16 steps within a 16 step grid.

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I just started moving over some Pyramid definition files to the Hapax instrument definition file and it looks like only the drum lanes allow you to name notes? I hope I’m missing something or this is temporary. My setup revolves around my Blackbox sampler. Not being able to define the notes and names for the 16 pads and 16 sequences means my main Pyramid def file for my main instrument isn’t possible on Hapax. Nor is my drum kit sample set definition file.
I don’t want to exaggerate or overreact but without being able to name notes in the def files, they’re missing a lot of functionality for me. Hapax didn’t support instrument definition files when I bought it so I was planning on keeping the Pyramid until that functionality was added. This new firmware got my hopes up :frowning:

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Hi there, is your OB6 Inst Definition available to download? Thank you for the other ones, including the Hydrasynth!

ooooh still no multi-track recording but im getting very excited about the possibilitles!

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@sirshannon couldn’t we use multiple drum lanes to solve this problem?

I too have both a Blackbox and a drum machine, and would like to have a drum lane for each.

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That seems to be the workaround but in addition to be clunky, it isn’t a great workaround for many use cases.

The most basic default use case would be only having 16 notes for the 16 pads, which would be 2 drum tracks. That’s not the worst workaround but it’s not ideal.
If you add the 16 sequences, that’s 4 drum tracks.
If you want to use the full MIDI control capabilities to control live looping or resampling, etc, the MIDI notes used would be notes 36 - 104 so a total of 9 drum tracks (2 tracks for triggering pads, 2 for triggering sequences, 2 for clearing pads, 2 for recording pads, 1 for the MIDI note actions [select prev/next pad, play pad, record pad, clear pad]).
And that doesn’t take into account any multisample pads take that a channel for themselves. My drum kit is a multisample pad with 23 notes mapped to drums so my drum kit alone would require 3 drum tracks.

My default setup for Blackbox in my Pyramid takes 6 channels: the 16 pads (sequences, etc) on one channel, 4 generic multisample pads, and my drum multisample pad.
Mapping that to setup in Hapax definition files using drum lanes would take 9 lanes for the defaults and 3 lanes for my drum kit so that’s 12 tracks.

I wouldn’t map my generic multisamples, I like keeping them generic. That may change with the Hapax thanks to the huge improvement of no longer tying an instrument definition to a single channel. That’s such a big improvement over Pyramid defs.

In general, the Hapax defs are vastly superior to the Pyramid defs. To me, as someone who almost never has a drum kit that would fit into one Hapax drum track and uses the Blackbox in most of my projects, the value of naming a note in the definition file isn’t worth the trouble of splitting things across multiple drum tracks. Other than naming notes, I don’t get anything useful from Hapax drum tracks. The 8 velocity grids seem cool for people that will use them (is this a new thing or is it something that exists in other hardware?) but I don’t think I’ll ever use those. Playing velocity like that doesn’t seem to be a good use of my time.
I don’t know if the 8 drum lanes per track is a limitation due to fitting nicely into the UI (8 rows in step mode, 8 velocity blocks in live mode) or if it is based on something else. I wish it was based on the General MIDI Standard drum map with almost 50 named notes. (I won’t mention the weird little animated graphic in Step mode other than to say that it tries to hard to be accurate for something that can not be accurate).

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Do you have the same issue ? When i open a project, it takes 15-20 seconds to open, and freeze during the process.

@sirshannon you obviously have a lot of experience sequencing. Impressive!

Another Hapax user suggested a product enhancement of reducing the number of velocity grids from the current 8, making room for more “notes” in a drum track. I’m totally on board with that idea!

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i’d be okay with scalable resolutions for the range of velocities (I think the Behringer RDs only have three or four unique velocity settings per instrument, so not sure if i need more than that per 8 instruments on a track)

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