MASTERMIND PBC BETA FIRMWARE 4.2 beta 3

Status
Not open for further replies.
rjmmusic

rjmmusic

Administrator
Staff member
Here's a beta release of firmware 4.2. The PBC/6X beta testers have had earlier 4.2 betas, but now it's time to get it in everyone else's hands.

FEATURES
  • Mastermind PBC/6X support. This is the vast majority of the changes, lots of work required!
  • Support for Meris pedals, Chase Bliss Dark World, Line 6 Helix LT, HX Effects and HX Stomp
  • New audio setting "Any button dismisses tuner" does what it says
  • New action: System / Set IA. This one allows one IA button turn another on or off. IA buttons now have an IA number, and Set IA uses that to determine which IAs to turn on or off. This is one of those features where it can be really helpful or can cause trouble depending on how you try to use it. With great power comes great responsibility! At least, the system will prevent improperly configured Set IAs from causing an infinite loop, so you shouldn't be able to hang the system
  • Editor now has the ability to do firmware updates on units that support it. This is any PBC or LT made in March 2019 or later. Older units can be updated to allow this feature, but it's not an update I would want end users to do, it's a bit tricky. I'm trying to figure out a solution for customers outside of the US.
BUG FIXES:
  • Fixed a bug where expression pedals and external switches didn't work when the tuner was active
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the Kemper tuner from being visible when using it in slave mode
TO UPDATE FIRMWARE:

PLEASE DON'T DO A MAJOR FIRMWARE UPDATE RIGHT BEFORE YOUR BIG GIG!

- First, back up your settings to a flash drive or computer! If you go back to 4.1 or earlier, your Mastermind will factory reset.
- Download and unzip the firmware file.
- Copy the file to a USB flash drive, and remove any other .rjf files from the flash drive.
- Eject the drive from your computer.
- Power on the Mastermind while holding the 1 and 3 buttons.
- Keep holding until you see "Mastermind Bootloader" appear on the screen.
- Now plug the flash drive into your Mastermind. The update should begin and will take a few minutes to complete.

Firmware: http://www.rjmmusic.com/downloads/PBC/Beta/MM42B3.zip

Mac Editor: http://www.rjmmusic.com/downloads/PBC/Beta/MastermindEditor-4.2b3.dmg
PC Editor: http://www.rjmmusic.com/downloads/PBC/Beta/MastermindEditor-4.2b3.zip

PBC/6X Manual: http://www.rjmmusic.com/downloads/PBC6X/PBC6X Manual-4.2.pdf
PBC/10 Manual coming soon!

Editor Manual: http://www.rjmmusic.com/wiki (not yet updated for 4.2)
 
Last edited:
Hi Ron,
I've had this happen a few more times recently... Loops 8 and 9 (stereo/parallel) will seemingly randomly stop passing signal. I can't recreate it reliably, but it's happened once on each loop over the past two weeks, after not happening for months prior to that. I'm still on FW 4.0.8 because it's been stable and the new FW hasn't offered anything I really need (and I'm lazy, haha).

The only way to fix it is to switch the loop from parallel to series and back to parallel. That always fixes it. Rebooting, changing presets, turning the loop on/off, all have no effect.

Any other reports of this issue?
 
It could be a bug in the older firmware, I've fixed a lot since 4.0.8. There's also a hardware related possibility, if your PBC is more than a year or two old, and you find that the problem only starts exactly at the time that you release a button on the PBC. We have a fix for that if that's what you think it is.
 
Is this a good alternative to IA Link?
  • New action: System / Set IA. This one allows one IA button turn another on or off. IA buttons now have an IA number, and Set IA uses that to determine which IAs to turn on or off. This is one of those features where it can be really helpful or can cause trouble depending on how you try to use it. With great power comes great responsibility! At least, the system will prevent improperly configured Set IAs from causing an infinite loop, so you shouldn't be able to hang the system
 
keg8605 said:
Is this a good alternative to IA Link?
  • New action: System / Set IA. This one allows one IA button turn another on or off. IA buttons now have an IA number, and Set IA uses that to determine which IAs to turn on or off. This is one of those features where it can be really helpful or can cause trouble depending on how you try to use it. With great power comes great responsibility! At least, the system will prevent improperly configured Set IAs from causing an infinite loop, so you shouldn't be able to hang the system
Click to expand...

It can be used in place of IA Link for sure. It's more flexible than IA Link, but requires even more care in setting it up. I would not be surprised if people figure out some pretty cool and surprising things to do with it. (I would also not be surprised if I get a lot of support requests because of it!) Don't use Set IA on buttons that have IA Link or grouping turned on. It probably would result in some weird behavior.

One important note I forgot to mention is the on and off values. On normal IA buttons, value 0 is off and 1 is on. On IA cycle buttons, 0 through 3 refer to steps 1 through 4, respectively.

And, since I'm talking about low level stuff, the system only allows each button to be triggered once per IA press or preset change. So if you have one button that turns on another button, and that second button tries to turn off the first button, the first button won't change - it's already been triggered once. Before adding this sanity check, it was really easy to lock up the PBC.
 
rjmmusic said:
It could be a bug in the older firmware, I've fixed a lot since 4.0.8. There's also a hardware related possibility, if your PBC is more than a year or two old, and you find that the problem only starts exactly at the time that you release a button on the PBC. We have a fix for that if that's what you think it is.
Click to expand...

Next time it happens I'll try to observe what I did immediately prior. If it's a button press (I'm relatively sure it is... seems like it happens when I turn something on or off, or change presets) I'll let you know. Mine is one of the original red ones from your first or second batch.
 
boyce89976 said:
Next time it happens I'll try to observe what I did immediately prior. If it's a button press (I'm relatively sure it is... seems like it happens when I turn something on or off, or change presets) I'll let you know. Mine is one of the original red ones from your first or second batch.
Click to expand...

Ok, if it's red, then it's the very first batch, we only did that once.
 
rjmmusic said:
One important note I forgot to mention is the on and off values. On normal IA buttons, value 0 is off and 1 is on. On IA cycle buttons, 0 through 3 refer to steps 1 through 4, respectively.
Click to expand...

I haven't played with this yet, but hopefully will in the next day or 2. Just so I understand the concept...are you saying that I can make pressing button A force the state of button B by setting the state of button B to 0 or 1? (Or, if button B is an IA Cycle button, I can make it jump to Step 4 by setting the value to 3?). If yes, and I force the state of button B to 1, does that button perform whatever function it would do normally when pressed?

If so, this is pretty slick...and something that I'm pretty sure I've been looking for.

For example....I have the standard Loops page as it comes from factory. On another page, I have some IA buttons that turn on/off certain combos of loops on a single press. Right now, I can't have the Loops page update all of the LEDs appropriately when I use one of these IA buttons that changes multiple loops...but if I'm reading into this new capability right, now I can. Although it'll take some time and careful programming.
 
Yes, exactly right. It will force a button to a specific state and will make the button run its actions, as if it had been pressed. And yeah, careful programming will be required! I think it will work in the case you mention - the single loop buttons should turn off the related multiple loop buttons when the single loop buttons are turned off. And, the multiple loop buttons should turn the single loop buttons on or off as needed. I haven't tried this myself, but it seems like it should work.
 
Nice, I'm really excited about the IA States feature! I've been wanting to be able to program a page that allows me to go to any gain stage in one click, and with this and groups I can finally do it!
 
PianoMan said:
Nice, I'm really excited about the IA States feature! I've been wanting to be able to program a page that allows me to go to any gain stage in one click, and with this and groups I can finally do it!
Click to expand...

Just to be clear, you can ALREADY do that. I've had it for over a year. It's just that the LEDs on OTHER buttons don't update and display correctly...but the actual loops work exactly as you want. I've got an entire page that is dedicated to different combos of drive pedals (I essentially have 5 drive pedals on my board). Works great for "on the fly" gain adjustments.
 
rjmmusic said:
Yes, exactly right. It will force a button to a specific state and will make the button run its actions, as if it had been pressed. And yeah, careful programming will be required! I think it will work in the case you mention - the single loop buttons should turn off the related multiple loop buttons when the single loop buttons are turned off. And, the multiple loop buttons should turn the single loop buttons on or off as needed. I haven't tried this myself, but it seems like it should work.
Click to expand...

Just did this and it works great! I just set each button to do the appropriate Set IA commands which are tied to the IA ID numbers I gave the loop buttons on the Loops page. Works perfect.

My only question...On this Gain Adj page I'm speaking of, all of these buttons are in a group so that pressing 1 turns off the current one (only 1 on at a time). This appears to be working fine, but above you mentioned NOT using this with grouped buttons. Since it works, should I leave this alone? Or is there another, better more reliable, way to do this. I guess I could assign all of THESE buttons an ID number and then have each button set all other IA IDs to 0. I think that would do it, but the IA action list would be getting pretty long. Thoughts?
 
Another question Ron...is there a way (or can you make a way) for us to assign a IA ID to an button when in IA Mode? In other words, I have a preset button, but when I toggle to IA Mode, there is no box to assign an ID to this button for use in IA Mode.

Not sure if that makes sense or not...?
 
Sorry for all the posts...I just got to playing some more and think I've found a bug...? Maybe? All of my presets are programmed to go to the Alternate Preset on 2nd press. On nearly every preset, the Alternate is set as "Global". I have 5 presets buttons across the bottom of Page 1 (no other preset buttons anywhere). When changing between these preset buttons inside a song, sometimes it jumps straight to the Global instead of going to the preset. Other times it works. Sometimes if you're on a preset and do the 2nd press, it changes to Global and then back to the preset again even though you've pressed the button once. It's happening SUPER often...probably at least a 1/3 of the time. Unusable for sure. I'd been so caught up in working with IA IDs I hadn't really tried changing presets too much.

Have you had this report yet Ron?

EDIT: It appears to change (when it's not suppose to) when you let the button up from being pressed. In other words, I'm on preset 1, I press the Preset 2 button and it does work, but when I let the button up, it changes to Global even though it shouldn't have. None of my 5 preset buttons have a hold function underneath them BTW.
 
Shoe,

Are you using ID 0? It seems that's the default ID, so if you're using it as a function, I wonder if that could be creating a problem. I haven't started using the new firmware yet...just playing around with the new editor to get familiarized with the new functions. ...the "0" id is one that I noticed is defaulted. I was mapping out the board on excel, and I inadvertently choose to use a the ID=0, but then during mapping realized the ID is 0 t on every ID.
 
Diezel said:
Shoe,

Are you using ID 0? It seems that's the default ID, so if you're using it as a function, I wonder if that could be creating a problem. I haven't started using the new firmware yet...just playing around with the new editor to get familiarized with the new functions. ...the "0" id is one that I noticed is defaulted. I was mapping out the board on excel, and I inadvertently choose to use a the ID=0, but then during mapping realized the ID is 0 t on every ID.
Click to expand...

No sir...I'm not. Haha, great minds think alike. I did mine in Excel too (the only way I could think of to easily keep track of what was what and which IDs had been used or not). So, I started at 1 and went up. I haven't ruled out the fact that I've done something wrong...so I'll start with that when I get home tonight. As you can see from my posts above, it was nearly 2am my time (knowing good and well I had to get up at 7am), so I was a little out of it while I was trying all the new Set IA stuff. Just like Ron pointed out initially, it's easy to mess this programming up and I may be the first to do it! I'll check back and report what I find....
 
ID 0 should be ignored by the system when trying to do a "Set IA", you shouldn't even be able to specify an ID of 0 when editing an action.

Craig: please send me your settings. Also, check to make sure you don't have any IA button that recalls the Global preset that has Send on Preset Change turned on - that could be a potential problem source.
 
Attached. Ron, keep in mind, I haven't checked everything yet...I'll do that tonight. Very good possibility this is my fault. I'm 99.99% sure I have no IA buttons that recall a Global. If one is there, it is by accident. I've never had one before. I was asleep last night...for real.

Another thing to tell you...the preset buttons that I have (5 of them) do have IA actions on them when in IA Mode. Some of them are even IA Cycle buttons. This was never a problem in the previous firmware. Not sure if that has anything to do with it.
 

Attachments

  • RJM PBC 20190327 - Beta 1.rjs
    1.7 MB · Views: 4
shoelesscraig said:
Attached. Ron, keep in mind, I haven't checked everything yet...I'll do that tonight. Very good possibility this is my fault. I'm 99.99% sure I have no IA buttons that recall a Global. If one is there, it is by accident. I've never had one before. I was asleep last night...for real.

Another thing to tell you...the preset buttons that I have (5 of them) do have IA actions on them when in IA Mode. Some of them are even IA Cycle buttons. This was never a problem in the previous firmware. Not sure if that has anything to do with it.
Click to expand...

I started reviewing it...lol, I need your excel mapping to follow it easier. Maybe you can upload it. I see a modification that can help follow flow easier for general viewing... @rjmmusic add on the screen pop ups the IA ID#. The only way you can see it now is to click the button and look if it has one.
 
shoelesscraig said:
Attached. Ron, keep in mind, I haven't checked everything yet...I'll do that tonight. Very good possibility this is my fault. I'm 99.99% sure I have no IA buttons that recall a Global. If one is there, it is by accident. I've never had one before. I was asleep last night...for real.

Another thing to tell you...the preset buttons that I have (5 of them) do have IA actions on them when in IA Mode. Some of them are even IA Cycle buttons. This was never a problem in the previous firmware. Not sure if that has anything to do with it.
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell, it is specifically related to Set IA. I went through and found all buttons that have a Set IA action, and turned off Send on Preset Change on all of those buttons that had it turned on. That made the problem go away. I don't know why it's causing the preset button(s) to double trigger, but it might be related to the amount of time it has to spend running Set IAs during the preset change. My Set IA testing only used two or three buttons, but you have 87 Set IA actions in your configuration! You are a good beta tester for sure, that's quite a torture test.

If I can find enough time to chase this down, I will hopefully get this fixed. Otherwise, it'll probably be removed from 4.2 and I'l try again later. I can't let this delay the PBC/6X release.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top