Hey. Not sure if this is a feature or a bug but i’ve noticed that the delay and reverb do not work on the external effects unless an audio track is unmuted. Meaning that when i have all my audio tracks muted the delay and reverb go away on the external gear i have plugged into the DT even when a sequence is running. Just wondering if anybody else has noticed this or if it’s a bug with my specific firmware.
Edited after reading the post again: An amp envelope has to be triggered for the FX to work, afaik. As a work around maybe turn a track down to zero volume instead of muting it so that there are still triggers going through to the amp.
Edit again: read @Tchu’s answer below 
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From the manual :
• After you load/reload a project, or after pressing [STOP] + [STOP], you must trig or play an audio track to activate the effects for the External in mixer.
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After you load/reload a project, or after pressing [STOP] + [STOP], you must trig or play an audio track to activate the effects for the External in mixer.
Does anyone know why this is the case? This feels like an unnecessary restriction and my brain is itching without a logical explanation. I am able to:
- start pattern with a midi track going and all audio tracks muted: external-in delay/reverb/chorus are disabled
- Unmute any audio track then mute it again: external-in delay/reverb/chorus now work
This just seems annoying, but I’m very possibly missing something here that makes this a desirable behavior.
My guess would be that the Stop double tap is meant to be a sort of panic button. It shuts off everything that has a decay, which includes the delay and reverb.
It’s especially useful in the case of the delay if it is set to a high feedback and is starting to run away with itself. Maybe not so much with the reverb… But then again it’s simpler conceptually perhaps.
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It may be because the external input has been added and needs to fit around existing architecture, its a small price to pay for such a useful feature imo.
Its not the muting/unmuting that triggers the fx, its simply the audio trig being pressed, I am fairly sure you can Track+trig if you don’t want to hear the trig press.
This
It’s the same behaviour on the DN though, which afaik has had external fx since day one, so there’s another reason I guess. Dunno what that could be though.
That all checks out. I use the double stop all over the place and thankful it exists. But, I’m not sure why pressing [PLAY] after doing a [STOP][STOP] wouldn’t “reopen” the mixer.
As it stands, the current behavior is just forcing me to pretend I’m using an audio track when I really just want to control and add effects to my perfourmer.
It may be because the external input has been added and needs to fit around existing architecture, its a small price to pay for such a useful feature imo.
Its not the muting/unmuting that triggers the fx, its simply the audio trig being pressed, I am fairly sure you can Track+trig if you don’t want to hear the trig press.
I’m a humble software engineer, but I’m under the impression my digitone is all digital once the audio gets past the A/D. If this was an analog pathway, I’d back off and chalk this up to architecture restrictions.
I guess I’m trying to understand if there is some use case I’m not considering that makes this a desired limitation, or if this is an intentionally missing feature intended to push you to buy the octatrack (or something). The more I use my AR and DN, the more I’m noticing the latter.
It’s not the end of the world, but so far has just resulted in time spent troubleshooting this unintuitive scenario. I will eventually develop the muscle/mind memory to work around this, but this was frustrating enough for me to resurrect this thread for an answer.
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This frustrates and confounds me too. Thanks for asking about it. I had hoped to be able to sequence an external synth with the digitone and run that synth back through the digitone’s inputs to share in the effects, but I ran into this problem so often that I just gave up.
I don’t think things are that much better with the octatrack, are they? You can use a thru track there to process external audio, but you still have to explicitly trigger the track before that will happen.
I really with there were an explanation for this
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