NOTIFY Messages from Rivage PM (and others)

[elianterelle]

First of all, thanks for documenting this API! Does anyone know if the Yamaha Rivage (or other consoles) sends out NOTIFY messages on fader and send level changes, either done manually by the user or via a scene recall?
I want to mirror the send levels from about 128 Input channels to about 3 busses, so if i needed to poll all of those, i feel like that would be a relatively big amount of requests per second (assuming i'm polling about 10x a second) and seems quite inefficient.

[BrenekH]

Sorry about the delayed response, I've been busy with other stuff in life and I wanted to test stuff out on a real console before I responded.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Rivage console to test, but I can talk about the TF consoles. I can confirm that the TF consoles send NOTIFY messages on fader changes.

Sample

NOTIFY set MIXER:Current/InCh/Fader/Level 12 0 -32768 "-?"
NOTIFY set MIXER:Current/InCh/Fader/Level 9 0 -1290 "-12.90"
NOTIFY set MIXER:Current/InCh/Fader/Level 14 0 -1210 "-12.10"
NOTIFY set MIXER:Current/InCh/Fader/Level 9 0 -2220 "-22.20"

However, for scene changes, the console only sends a notification that the scene has changed.

Sample

NOTIFY ssrecall_ex scene_b 99
NOTIFY sscurrent_ex scene_b 99 unmodified

What I would do is listen for the fader change notifications and mirror them as you like. Then when you receive a scene change notification, poll all of the parameters you are interested in and mirror them as you need.

Hope this helps!

[elianterelle]

Thanks! Do you know if it also sends notifys for Send Level Changes(so sends from a channel to a mix)? And do you have any experience polling many parameters at once? Ideally, i'd be looking to get 4 sends from 128 channels, so 512 values in total, which i'd need to poll after every scene change (which will happen quite often)...

[BrenekH]

I tested yesterday and I can confirm that notifies are sent when the sends from a channel to mix are modified. In my testing, the console was sending MIXER:Current/InCh/ToMix/Level messages with the updates.

I've never tried requesting that much data from a console before, but I don't see why there would be a major slowdown from polling 512 parameters. Perhaps if you were using Wi-Fi somewhere in the signal chain there could be problems? I would personally just try it and see if there are performance issues.

One idea I have for speeding up the polling would be to dispatch the GET requests without then waiting for the response. Since the responses to a GET request contain the parameter name in them, you could have a separate thread/process to read and act on the responses. That's a decent amount of extra complexity, so I would for sure try and see if the simple way is fast enough, and then explore optimization ideas if it actually isn't.