Part of my excitement with the MC6pro was the idea that I could probably remove one element from my chain (the disaster area micro.ghost et al) which I’d been previously using to integrate my little blue boy into my rig for years. It absolutely does work out of the box, both power and MIDI! Problem is, the Zoom doesn’t really do MIDI ‘properly’ and it’s not even an advertised feature. It listens on all channels for PC/CC messages over USB HOST and acts on them all. If I send a PC anywhere, it changes the zoom as well etc. The micro.ghost is channel selectable, which it then blasts onward to the channel-agnostic zoom to get around this problem.
Is there a way, either an option that could be added, or something existing, that could restrict MIDI messages over the USB HOST port to only a specific channel(s) before it leaves the MC6? I’m imagining something like either it’s own “destination” or an option in general configurations to limit the messages passed by the port to be certain channels.
This is really helpful, thank you! Didn’t know anything about it.
If i’m understanding the behaviour correctly from the example, all messages beneath the mask inherit the masks behaviour? So what I would need to do is for every preset/every bank have a midi mask as the first message which excludes USB from everything beneath it, and then one at the end to set USB mask and place the messages for the Zoom after that? I can see that getting pretty complicated on some of my presets and I definitely couldn’t have done it before the 32-message limit. I can see it working but it’d be an incredible amount of work, and I presume it’s also gesture based… I’m making a lot of assumptions because the behaviour isn’t explained in much detail.
An ideal situation would be a global mask of some kind (i.e. channel 3 is passed over usb but not omniports or DIN etc., all other channels have an inverse mask passing to omniports and DIN but not USB).
Yes, adding MASK messages will get complicated. What we could possibly do in future updates is have a global setting to send MIDI out on selected ports during start up. So you just need to add MASK message on these Zoom presets to enable sending via USB Host for that preset only
Something like this solution I would greatly prefer - and it’s a bit more logical as it works top down rather than bottom up. Makes more sense to only allow the limited/selected channels or messages to be sent over HOST rather than individually restrict all the other unwanted messages.
In my case my Zoom “channel” is 3, so all messages on MIDI channel 3 are for the zoom and only the zoom, but because it is an omni device it responds to all messages on all channels. The ideal solution would a global setting “zoom mode” that masks all channel 3 (for instance) messages to usb-host only, and hides all other messages from usb-host.
Either way, thanks for taking an interest in solving this with me!
All MIDI devices should have a setting to respond to only a specific MIDI channel so implementing a port setting for each channel may not be so useful i.e. not looking to implement a solution specifically for the Zoom product which does not officially support MIDI. Not 100% sure yet, will need to think about it.
There might be some use cases where we want to avoid sending MIDI messages on specific ports to overcome specific issues like MIDI Clock or Exp CC noise on some products.
All Zoom multistomps behave this way (it’s assumed to be connected to a PC not a MIDI hub, and you’re right in that it isn’t “officially” a feature, it’s a byproduct of being able to use the zoom effect manager over USB and things like ToneLib to navigate and manage preset data). It does respond logically to standard midi (certain CC, PC and has a SysEx implementation) but because of the above assumptions there’s no way for the user to specify what channel to listen on. There’s no need to specify if you’re using it “as intended”.
Anyway given that the official marketing/feature description for the USB-Host port on the MC6 Pro explicitly mentions “control … Zoom Multistomps without a costly and cumbersome adaptor” I hope we can arrive at a way that makes doing so more easy, whatever it is. Hopefully it would have wider applications than just for this issue
I see now that there is a beta firmware, and have found the public roadmap on Trello, but has there been any progress made on this particular issue since May? I can’t deduce from the roadmap whether it is being worked on, has been fixed, or neither of these. Hope it’s of enough interest to merit work, frankly! It’s pretty critical functionality to me.
We have a ticket for remapping of MIDI channels and I can probably squeeze in the specifying of ports for each channel as well. But that requires more work and will likely not make the next update as we want to launch this firmware asap due to a number of critical bugs being fixed.
If you want, I can compile you a beta firmware that sends only to USB HOST port for all CC/PC channel 3 messages
Glad to hear it’s on the radar and happy for any solution to the issue! Not my intent to be a tyrant about it. If it’s trivial to do that (the compiled beta firmware) I’d be glad to run with it until it winds up in a mainstream release.
Pleased to report that everything works for me here! I’ve simply enabled everything except USB-HOST on all channels, excepting again channel 3 which has all outputs as normal. A question though: if there’s no boxes checked on a channel, does the device assume no modifications to the default state of “all outputs”, or is the default of unchecked boxes no outputs from any midi channel?
bump, is this actually working these days? interested in controlling the og zoom multi pedals and the new plus models. unfortunately dont have anything in my midi chain that can act as a usb host like the disaster area ghost midibox, and waiting on the mc8pro to upgrade my controller, so if you can set omniports to handle these pedals, that’d clinch things further…
omniports don’t serve usb host themselves midi, but MC6pro has (and I presume MC8pro will also) both a device and a dedicated host port. in my set up the device goes to a breakout panel for the editor connection, and the usb host port goes to an MS70CDR exclusively for both MIDI and power. the zoom pedals act on all channels though, so you do need to mask a specific channel in the editor to send to the host port, otherwise it will send all channels by default and the zoom will go wild
This worked like a charm. Thank you. I am now able to recall presets on my Zoom MS-70 CDR+, and just toggle it to recall an EMPTY preset (PC #99 in the screenshot below) to effectively turn it “off”.
I have also set a MIDI Clock message on Press, in hopes of having the Zoom pedal receive the tempo setting that my other pedals are receiving.
However, I’m either doing something wrong on the Zoom side or the Editor side, because the pedal doesn’t seem to be showing any indication it’s receiving a clock message.
Has anyone successfully been able to send MIDI Clock messages to the Zoom multistomp pedals before?
Thank you for the help! Loving this community so far.
