Having some Issues with NDLR and VCV Rack

[Jesse Johannesen]

I can't tell whats happening from the video well enough to diagnose the issue with the pad part, but from what you describe with the Drone it might just not be set to one of the settings that follows the chord degrees. All of the Drone settings with 5 dots are meant to follow the chord degrees, while the ones before that play just the Root of the current Key, so that would make sense that they change with the Key, but not the chord degree changes.

To troubleshoot the Pad, can you try using that same setup being sent to other device? I'd like to see if it's an issue that persists outside of VCV rack. Does pressing the Chord Degree buttons cause the Pad to work properly but not CC control here? It doesn't sound like the timing is consistently off by the same amount of time, so this is probably not the solution, but check the settings pages and see if you can set pad quantize to off and see if that makes a difference.

Jesse

Thanks for the reply Jesse,

I have been doing some more testing with my other hardware and everything on the NDLR works perfectly in terms of normal use. I'm aware of the Drone settings that either follow the root or the chord degrees, and I did have it set to the mode that is supposed to sync with degree changes. If I do everything through CC control (Key, Mode, Degree) there are no timing issues, but like I said the actual gate triggers don't come through for Pad or Drone. While hooked up to VCV and playing the same pattern with CC changes, pressing the buttons on the unit DOES properly send gates. So if for example I have strum turned on for the Pad channel, pressing the button for chord degree III properly sends the on/off info and it gets converted to gates/trigs in VCV, but a CC change to chord degree III doesn't. 

I don't really have any other hardware devices besides my PC to test the exact same scenario (Sending CC to control degree and see if it properly triggers Pad and Drone changes), but I could try in a different DAW besides VCV. But the Pad and Drone not retriggering on CC change does seem like it's something tied to the NDLR and not VCV, unless someone can chime in with experience controlling chord degree through CC using other sequencing hardware or DAW that doesn't have this behavior.

I do think that some of the issues I described in my first post have to do with the way VCV handles its Midi-CV conversion, because I have seen people talk about issues with gate/trigger when using the NDLR with their modular gear (stemming from the note on/off conversion as was mentioned previously). At this point though it's definitely more usable than when I started, really the only issue now is that CC changing the chord degree is not behaving the same way as just pressing the buttons on the unit itself. I'm not sure if pressing the button on the NDLR itself is sending more control information than just changing the CC does, but it seems that way.

I've been talking to the team and it sounds like the issue may lay with VCV's ability to process Note Off Messages sent Directly before a Note On Message. Since the NDLR doesn't keep track of gate length, each note is on until the next note is fired, at which point the NDLR sends first a Note off and immediately after, a Note On for the new note. This has shown not to play nice in some scenarios, with occasional hung notes (for me on my Ipad occasionally I experience this) and it seems that VCV rack was another example that has had some issues (I wasn't aware of that before). 
I can't guarantee that's what's happening here, but it sounds like a likely culprit. The good news is we're currently testing a fix for this and should hopefully have a solution to work with shortly. I'll keep you posted!
Jesse