Visual feedback using live oriented hosts (Gig performer, etc)

edding

First of all, thank you very much for bringing this useful music tool back to life.
I use mobius with Gig Performer and midi foot pedalboard for live shows, and it's fantastic.
Gigperfomer only communicate with mobius with VST parameters and MIDI. I didn't find a way to have visual feedback to know what is really happening in every moment. (Recording, playing, etc).
The VST parameters translate to widget values. That's work to know the parameters state for almost all the rest of plugins.
Anybody knows a way to know the actual state (Recording, playing, etc) if you don't have the mobius screen opened.?

jeff

It's an interesting and complicated question.

Mobius is a somewhat unusual plugin because how you control it doesn't fit well with the VST/AU notion of a "parameter". Most plugins have parameters that are bi-directional values, you can read them and write them, and hosts will show them using UI widgets like sliders and knobs. Mobius has those, but it also has a lot of "functions" which are one-shot commands rather than things that have a value you can see and change.

Neither VST or AU has a good way of dealing with those, what we can do is expose them as boolean on/off parameters, so you can start the function by setting the parameter to 1 and turn if off by setting it to 0. That makes it possible to control Mobius with host parameter automation but it's awkward and few people do that. It is far more common to just send it MIDI events as if it were a keyboard, but instead of playing a sound, those notes make functions happen.

But what you're asking for is really neither of those, what you have listed are what Mobius calls "modes", the state of recording, or the state of playing, etc. A mode is the way Mobius is behaving at a given time, but you can get into and out of modes as a side effect of lots of things. "Record Mode" therefore can't be a parameter that you turn on and off, It's a state Mobius can be in but it can happen as a response to many things. It's sort of like saying "I feel happy". There isn't a Happy Button you can press and release, you become happy as a result of other things. This may not seem obvious for something as simple as play vs. record, but there are reasons for that. One example, you can enter a state of recording after any of these functions: Record, Overdub, and Multiply. Sometimes you might want to know if you are specifically doing a Multiply, and other times in any state of recording, no matter how you got there so you can make something in the UI turn red.

We've experimented with a few ways of doing this bi-directional feedback for control surfaces. One option is a read-only VST parameter like RecordMode that you can test to see if it is recording for some reason, but you can't set it. Another is MIDI feedback through "event scripts" where you configure a script to run whenever the system enters a recording mode, and then that script can do anything, like send out a MIDI command to turn a light red.

Event scripts are the most powerful way to do this, but they're hard to set up right now, and don't do everything people have wanted.

Depending on how deeply you want to get into scripting, it's safe to say that right now Mobius doesn't have particularly good support for bi-directional communication with control surfaces or host applications that can behave like control surfaces. It will get better eventually, for GP the resurrection of OSC support that Mobius 2.x had may help as well.

edding

Thank you so much for your detailed answer. I understand it better now.

For the basic live guitar use case, just a read-only parameter could be enough.

As we (guitarists) use only our feet to communicate with software on top of a scenario, sometimes we make mistakes and push the wrong button.
So, at the end, the priority for us is to recognise some critical situations in a show (for example, detect an undesired state of recording triggered by mistake).
For now, I'm surviving using basic scripting inside GP: Depending on the midi command, I just try to switch on/off a red button.
I can use it in a simple approach of using only 3 Midi commands (Record, Play & GlobalReset).

jeff

Yeah, the Mobius UI is intended to be at least partially visible from the laptop screen. It doesn't have to be as big as it is by default, and you can configure it to show less of what you don't need, but it is usually visible while performing so you can see a few things. I understand that isn't ideal for some people with complex plugin and host configurations, all fighting for space on the screen. A few people have made use of event scripts to turn lights on and off on a foot controller so you don't have to be always glancing at a laptop. I can walk you through how to set that up, but it's evolving a lot right now and will change in the future.

gustebeast

I have a TouchOSC app which I use to monitor Mobius since it's running on a mac mini
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dPrNGH-RdXGYMjW8q3s-kQap4viW7W_D/view

Mobius has event scripting so you can send a MIDI message whenever recording starts or stops as well as when a loop gets back to its starting point and restarts. This can all be pieced together to render a UI, although it requires a decent amount of tinkering.