Q: recommended/required delay time between sequential MIDI commands?

[johnbeamon]

I use MIDI presets to send PC preset selection and CC 69 value 0-7 to choose snapshots, from Bandhelper on iOS. I found that when I requested "snapshot 4, delay ON, snapshot 2", I was instead getting "default-on-load snapshot, delay ON, snapshot 2" on some presets. At first I thought I was chasing a Snapshots bug, but I had a hunch when I saw it was making changes on the default Saved snapshot, not a snapshot number in particular. When I significantly raised the delay between MIDI sends, it changed to snapshot 4 first, then added FX, then snapshot 2. Problem solved.

 

Question is, is there some documented minimum time needed for Helix to do certain things upon receipt of a MIDI command? It would be awesome if I could send 5 MIDI instructions, each 0.1s apart. It's turning out to be more like 0.5s apart, which adds up when you're reconfiguring a preset on-demand. I'm using this instead of building a preset for every song. Choose amp-preset, choose lead snapshot, add FX, switch to snapshot for the beginning of the song. And if I ever tire of the Placater, I need only replace that preset in slot 003 to change the sound of all the songs that used it. The design suits my needs; the timing was giving me a problem.

[rd2rk]

AFAIK there's no documented required wait time between MIDI messages.

 

Recent updates (are you on v3.15?) have attempted to address this issue.

A default wait between PC and CC#69 was added, in addition to the user selectable WAIT time.

In addition, "Preset Spillover" was added to eliminate the time it takes to load a new preset.

Unfortunately, Preset Spillover requires that you give up an entire processor (Path 2) to use it.

This limits the # of Blocks and type of FX that you can use within the limits of available DSP.

Though not ideal, since it eliminates the Preset load time you should be able to use more Presets to get around that.

 

I'm not sure why you would want to send PC# then "snapshot 4, delay ON, snapshot 2"".

You should be able to simply send PC#>Snapshot#. The Snapshot should determine which FX Blocks are ON/OFF.