Undesired behaviour with Elephant

Guest_47

📁 Original board: Elephant › Troubleshooting, Tips & Tricks

This is a description of my difficulties using the Surface Dial with Elephant v1.9.2. I'm only trying at the moment to use it without midi mapping and the only setting I have changed so far is to enable the Touchpad/Trackball mode. I find it necessary to enable that because I find that clicking the Dial button is quite a clumsy way to release the knob/slider control because it requires a reasonable amount of force and when I do that, it is very difficult not to simultaneously nudge/rotate the Dial, changing the control setting.

When I operate controls, usually the mouse pointer turns invisible, the control moves and is then released when I move my mouse. The mouse pointer then reappears above and right, or below and left of the initial mouse pointer position. If I release the control by clicking the Dial, the pointer seems to reliably reappear at the location it first went invisible, but the position of reappearance is unpredictable when releasing it by moving the mouse. It's a pity that this is not the behaviour when releasing the knob by moving the mouse. It would be great if this behaviour could be changed so it always reappears at the same position where it goes invisible, including in Touchpad/Trackball mode.

I have also experienced a problem a few times where, when turning the Dial, the control moves but gets stuck and then the pointer does not reappear. Clicking the Dial button, the mouse buttons or hitting ESC doesn't bring it back. I have to shut down Elephant to get it back. I haven't found a reliable way to reproducible this fault.

PabloMartin

Not all DAWs, plugins and software support mouse in place.
To solve that issue, ensure mouse in place OFF is disabled in Elephant.
Anyway this not be compatible way of work with sliders, if the software you use wont support mouse in place on sliders.
If the software you are using is VCV rack, there is a sea of issues and unpredictable results, I explain in your other post

If this happen on VCV, is normal and I explain in your VCV post possible solutions.
If happen with other software, need a predictable way to reproduce the issue.
Your main goal is use with VCV?

Guest_47

Thanks again for replying 🙂 Yes, in my case "mouse in place OFF" is disabled (unchecked) in Elephant; the only non-default setting is the Touchpad/Trackball mode is enabled. I am also changing the speed settings but this does not change any behaviour, except for what I described separately with the VCV Rack topic.

You are correct that I mainly intend to use this with VCV Rack but everything in this topic/thread refers to my experience outside of VCV Rack. These are my experiences with testing all the other editors and VSTs I thought I might also want to use it with on my PC. I tried this on some different VSTs inside my Reaper DAW and also on two standalone (non-VST) synthesizer editors; the microSTATION editor from Korg and the KingKORG editor from Soundtower. The mouse pointer disappearing and not returning happened with VSTs inside Reaper and also with the microSTATION editor. I didn't try the other editor enough to observe it. As I mentioned, I have not yet managed to find a repeatable way to reproduce this problem, but I will let you know if I do.

The mouse in place behaviour is the same with all the editors I have mentioned. Maybe I am just unlucky that none of them are implemented in the way that Elephant supports. The one place I noticed that the mouse in place behaviour seems to behave properly is on volume knobs in the main part of Reaper's interface; I think that is the only place in my software that it works in the way I hoped.

PabloMartin

I downloaded the kingkorg editor, and see some troubles maybe I can fix the issue related to in place mouse, I think if is fixed with this software will be fixed with others.This software not implement in native way mouse in place feature, until I try fix how elephant work with this software, I think the best way to work for you is disable hide the mouse on elephant, disable mouse in place and use pressing the mouse if needed, for sue vertical on elephant and not knob mode (what emulate native mouse in place feature for software not have that).

PabloMartin

Please need to know what is the exact model of your CPU.

Guest_47

Thanks for replying again so quickly Pablo 🙂 I will follow your suggestions. It will be wonderful if you can think of a way to change the mouse-in-place behaviour for editors using non-standard implementation of the editors I use and it might help other users too. Please note that in the KingKORG editor, they implement three options for changing the knob settings. In File|Preferences in that editor I am using the "Linear - vertical motion" mode, but they also support two other modes. I can't remember what the default mode is, so you should check this.

The CPU on this machine is an Intel i7-8550U

PabloMartin

" It's a pity that this is not the behaviour when releasing the knob by moving the mouse. "

About your comment, I forgot mention what you request already exist, I assume the problem is you always have your hand over the dial and the mouse, and that cause a never ending fight between mouse and the dial. I create a video for you soon to you in order to show how is the way to use the Dial, if I explain just with just text...... probably you think that is useless way, so wait for my video, and you see how with just with a little of practice you can work without any problem. Anyway I already improve the code this night a little bit for make the in place mouse work better when the dial action is released by mouse move. I continue testing in the next days and release a new version with the improvement soon.

Guest_47

Thanks for the update. I will wait until you feel ready to release a new version. Yes, I have been using the dial with my left hand and the mouse with my right hand and maybe there is a fight that I haven't understood how to avoid. I am grateful and impressed with how quickly you have tried to address my concerns with a possible software update (providing you are happy with it after your testing). Also, based on your advice, I have enabled the "Show Cursor" option for now and by removing any surprise about where the mouse pointer might reappear, it does improve usability a bit.

Guest_47

Hi Pablo, There is some interesting news in the VCV Rack world. A module developer has just released a VCV module called "Sail" that maps midi CC-based 0-127 and relative/continuous encoders to allow you to control the dial under the mouse pointer in VCV. I played with Elephant's settings and it works with Elephant's 0-127 midi mode but unfortunately the relative encoder mode doesn't work yet. I created a feature request for the developer to ask him to consider adding the Twos compliment relative controller mode here https://github.com/stoermelder/vcvrack-packone/issues/98 If he does this, I think it will be the best way to use Elephant with VCV. He has implemented a different type of relative mode that is supported by the beatstep pro and is reported to work very well.

PabloMartin

Chameleon is setup to send 7fh 1h as default that is 127 1 you can change to other mode if you need.

Guest_47

Thanks Pablo. I've now got Elephant working with the module I mentioned. I'll describe the setup in case someone else wants to try it: it now turns out that Ben, the developer of the Stoermelder VCV Rack modules, has another module named MIDI-STEP that is specifically for rotary encoders. It sends up/down signals to his SAIL module, which then deals with controlling the knobs and sliders beneath the mouse position. So, in VCV Rack, you add a MIDI-STEP and a SAIL module and connect the MIDI-STEP INC and DEC outputs to the SAIL module's INC and DEC inputs. Set the MIDI-STEP module's mode setting to "Behringer X-Touch Relative1" then set Elephant to midi encoder mode, and the Up Down values in the Elephant dashboard to 63 and 65. After that, it works! It's almost perfect except there is currently a very slight "bug" I think with the behaviour of the SAIL module that I have reported to Ben, but even now, I think this is the best way to use the Surface Dial to control VCV Rack.

PabloMartin

Thanks for the update and your commitment.
This will be useful for all HI!computer community.