I have been trying without success to control the Polymoon from the Digitakt using a midi to 3.5mm trs mini jack into female to male stereo adaptor. I got in touch with Meris customer service who tell me that I need to buy their midi IO box which has “active opto-isolator needed for a reliable MIDI connection with a standard TRS Patch cable” to control the pedal via midi. So now I have to buy another Meris product (£100+) to get full functionality or is there any way around this?
Hi, can you solder? I had exactly the same question to Meris, and got the same answer, but instead soldered a midi jack onto the end of a TS cable, and it worked just fine. And cheap!
I can try find the (better) advice another pedal maker sent me about which pins in the midi jack to solder the TS wires to, let me know if it’s of interest.
(Edited to say TS, not TRS)
Yes if you can give me the info I will try to sort it. The spiel the rep gave me sounds like bs… I see no reason whatsoever that an opto isolator should be necessary but I think there could be an issue with the pin out situation. I tried to send a patch from the polymoon into cubase and looking at the midi data coming from the Polymoon in the midi monitor and it was various random inconsistent and sporadic controller numbers, no sysex so there is definitely something amiss. However the pedal itself seems to be somewhat buggy, the negative feedback keeps coming back on when I don’t want it and I’m wondering if there is any way to reset the pedal.
Found it, chap at chase bliss was was more helpful and sent me the following diagram, which worked perfectly for digitakt to polymoon.
Meris did however say that different midi interfaces work slightly different with current / voltage sink stuff and that can cause noisy midi data. I never had to learn what that really means though as I got it working between Digi and polymoon and didn’t need anything else.
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That’s a mono jack. I thought TRS was necessary.
I wired up a jack to midi as per the diagram and now it’s possible to send program change messages to the polymoon to change presets and CC#4 (footswitch control) is on target but when I try sending different CCs all sorts of crazy things are happening which don’t correspond to the Polymoon’s midi implementation chart at all. Very strange.
is it on latest firmware ? (the polymoon)… i dont have one so cant try it out.
I asked the Meris rep about that yesterday and apparently there are no firmware updates possible with this pedal. I said that most synths have operating systems which are upgradable by sysex messages and he was genuinely unaware of this fact.
So did I, but chase bliss person said TS worked for the way Meris designed thier pedal.
That sounds odd, I had no issue with getting the right parameters to be affected by Cc’s from the takt.
Fingers crossed I think I got it working now.