The Presonus Faderport: A deceptive package?
'Control your DAW with award-winning controllers!' This is how the manufacturer praises his MIDI controller. In my opinion this is misleading advertisment, as it implicates that the Faderport would perfectly cooperate with just any DAW. However, this is only true for Presonus' own Software Studio One.
I'm working with Samplitude ProX and I tested the controller with all four MCU presets provided by the Faderport (Cubase, Ableton, Sonar Logic). To do so, I created corresponding individual config files within Samplitude, but also set up Cubase (Elements 11), Ableton (Live 11 Suite) und Sonar (Platinum 23.10.0), again with the corresponding Faderport presets.
None of the presets left me nearly satisfied. There are always several buttons that don't send any MIDI message at all, they are, so to speak, dead. They also vary from preset to preset. In Cubase and SONAR presets that would prominently be, among others, the Click button. It's a pity, that, instead of a unidirectional MIDI preset, Presonus didn't provide a general MCU preset with just every button sending a MIDI message that could be individually assigned.
In the Ableton preset, switching from Marker mode to almost any other mode (e.g. Zoom), triggers a MIDI commmand, the very same that is sent by the PREV button in Marker mode. Thus, changing the mode inevitably puts the play cursor on the previous marker. Or, if there's none, at the very beginning of the project.
The encoder button in Master mode of the Logic preset resets the master fader to exactly -2,8 dB. Not owning a Mac, I could only test this with Samplitude but I'm assuming the result would be the same.
With the Sonar preset all I could get from the encoder in Master mode were erratic twitches in the DAW.
Thomann, my dealer, suggested that I return the Faderport for repair, which I did. As it came back, some MIDI messages were altered so I had to adapt my config files, beyond that nothing changed.
The layout of the buttons is, compared to other controllers, very ergonomic, at least for my workflow. However, for my liking the buttons have too high a pressure point, thus aggravating quick working.
The Presonus support is abysmal. Hair-raising proposals (like a firmware reset) all circumvent the problem. Steinberg is made responsible for the MCU protocol, Magix for the programming of Samplitude. Everything else is being ignored. The ticket is being closed as solved. This seems to be common practice if you want to believe the user forum at answers.presonus.com.
I had contacted the CEO and, for a whole year, grappled with the Presonus Product Manager. And he left me hanging out to dry. Whereas, it could be such an easy job to erradicate at least some of the described bugs via a firmware update.
A software to program the Faderport on your own, a given with some other manufacturers, is denied by the company.