Arturia prophet plugin randomly changes preset in mainstage

I am using Arturia's Prophet V plugin in mainstage. When I send program change messages from an external keyboard in order to change the mainstage patch, the prophet quite often (but not always) changes its sound to a different preset. None of my other Arturia plugins have this problem.
Is there a way to disable this behaviour in mainstage?
I have tried to contact Arturia about this but have had no response as yet.

Thanks

Macbookpro 2.4, Mac OS X (10.6.2), 4 gig ram

Posted on Feb 9, 2010 2:23 PM

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13 replies

Feb 10, 2010 11:02 AM in response to philpeskett

First of all, without describing your topology, I can't tell whether there is actually a problem as it sounds to me that exactly the right thing is happening.

For example, if I have multiple patches in MainStage and each patch has a channel strip containing an instance of your virtual synth, then when you switch patches in MainStage, the patch will update the settings of the virtual synth based on how you last saved it for that patch. If it didn't do that, the whole product would be rather useless.

Feb 10, 2010 1:12 PM in response to dhjdhj

Firstly thanks to everyone for your replies - glad I'm not trying to solve this on my own any more.
The sampler instrument idea would be tough in this case as I'm playing quite involved parts with a live band.

Let me give you an example of what my problem is.
I have a mainstage patch called Skin Deep Split cos the tune is called Skin Deep and I've split the keyboard. There are two channel strips in the patch, one running Arturia's Minimoog and the other running the problematic Prophet plugin. The prophet is set on a program (preset?) that i've called LowSkinDeep. Now if I send a program change message from my Nord Lead in order to change the mainstage patch then the patch changes as expected but in addition the prophet plugin on the patch that I've just come from gets changed to a different program, in this case one called 'Spindown' (named after another song). I can even watch this happening by having the prophet's editor screen open. So when I come back to my original patch (Skin Deep Split) the prophet will be playing the wrong sound even though the minimoog on the other channel strip is fine.
After this point no amount of program change messages will alter the prophet program - it stays on the same wrong one.
This happens with lots of different mainstage patches within my concert. The prophet will always change itself to the same program every time I repeat the experiment on the same patch, but interestingly for each different mainstage patch it selects a different program to use as its favourite.
I've got some of Arturia's other analogue synth plugins running in the same concert but it's only ever the prophet that behaves like this.
I have tried saving both the concert and the prophet program on the correct sound before I start changing patches but it makes no difference.
Any ideas?

Feb 10, 2010 8:39 PM in response to philpeskett

First of all, I'm assuming you are using MainStage 2.1 as I'm not willing to vouch for anything working consistently in 1.x

I'm also assuming that you're not using channel strip aliases, so that on each MainStage patch you should have a separate instance of the plugin. Indeed, you should be able to double-click on the prophet plugin inserted in the channel strip for each MainStage patch and so you should see two independent instances of the plugin appear.

Yet what you have described seems to me as if there is just one "prophet" for multiple patches so I'm not quite sure what's going on here.

Feb 11, 2010 4:53 AM in response to dhjdhj

Yes I'm using mainstage 2.1 though I also had exactly the same problem with Mainstage 1. I'm also having the same problem using V1 or V2 of the arturia prophet.

I'm becoming convinced that this is a bug in the prophet software.
I'm not using any aliases, always separate instances of the plugin, and yes I can get independent windows for each instance.

If I change mainstage patches with the cursor then the prophet does not change and everything works perfectly. Also if I connect a usb keyboard and make patch changes with that, then in this concert at least the prophet remains unchanged, but I have had exactly the same issue using this usb keyboard in other concerts.

It seems that the prophet is responding to program change messages, but in a way that I can't predict. For instance in one concert the prophet plugin works fine on mainstage patch 4 but on patch 5 it changes to a different sound, whereas in another concert it's the other way around, so it's not always doing something strange in response to the same midi message.

If there was a way to disable a plugin's response to program change messages within mainstage then I'm sure that would solve my problem, but I don't see anything like that so far. In the channel strip inspector there are check boxes to filter out other midi messages but not program change messages.

Being able to change the sound setting on a plugin synth from an external keyboard is something I'd really like to be able to do as it would surely be much more memory efficient than having different instances of the synth for every patch. It's frustrating that this is happening on one plugin without me being able to control or predict it.

Still no response from Arturia!

Feb 11, 2010 7:32 AM in response to philpeskett

Well, I don't have the Arturia Prophet but I have their 2600 and just for grins I created a brand new concert with two patches, each continaing one 2600V with a different sound.

From my external MIDI controller, I could change the mainstage patch and I got the correct 2600V sound for each patch.

I wonder though whether OTHER information is being sent to your Prophet. It might be worth running the Midi monitor (www.snoize.com) and in particular spy on all midi OUTPUTS, not just inputs, to see if something else is being sent to that plugin.

Feb 11, 2010 9:44 AM in response to dhjdhj

You can also download a free audio unit instrument called midiO. It will let you route midi messages out to a specific port (most useful when you are using it in combination with Midi monitor or midilog). Then you can see exactly what midi messages MainStage is sending to the instrument.

Also just a warning about midi monitor, it appears to have some problems if midi messages are sent too quickly and doesn't always report the messages correctly (midilog does work properly).

Feb 13, 2010 8:20 AM in response to philpeskett

So glad to see this topic being discussed. Interesting read. I made the unfortunate mistake of buying Arturia's 10th Anniversary collection of classic synths - which include the prophet discussed in this post. They sound great - the graphics are incredible ... but as plug-ins within MainStage2, they have been nothing but trouble. Arturia's tech support finally gave up on me and stopped responding to my pleas for help. Their reply to everything was an "update" which never helped. The plug-ins are so unreliable that I can never incorporate them into a live performance as I never know when they are going to fail. Really is a shame. In general I have ben finding that 3rd party plug-ins don't always work well with MainStage2. I am even attempting to update my Mac Notebook Pro to Snow Leopard so I can take advantage of MainStage's 64-bit feature. Maybe this could help? Grabbing at straws at this point.

Feb 13, 2010 10:02 AM in response to Tony T MainStage user

I have the original versions of Moog Modular, Arp 2600 and CS80. I refused to buy the prophet because they used a dongle and I won't upgrade to the new versions of the products I have because of their new licensing model. I don't really use them with MS.

However, I do use 3rd party plugins from AAS, Native Instruments, G-Force, Plogue, Spectrasonics) and although I had a certain amount of grief with them under earlier versions of MS, I am finding that MS 2.1 (32-bit version) is working really reliable and those plugins work just fine.

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Arturia prophet plugin randomly changes preset in mainstage

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