A number of problems after some weeks now

Lab KeyLab Essential
#1

I have had the keylab essential 88 mk3 for a few weeks now using it with Ableton 12. Generally it’s been good and what I expected, but there have been issues and I think the remote scripts are badly written and full of bugs. I really don’t think anyone at Arturia properly tested the scripts with Ableton, and I wish the scripts were opened source so the community can help fix issues and make improvements.

My goal when buying the MK3 and V collection was to use it for live looping and I like that I can control many of the V collection common synth settings from the mk3 as if I had the hardware version of the synth without doing any midi mapping. Generally it deliveries on my expectations but…

Main problems I have found so far:

  1. The mk3 remote script does not always initialise correctly and when the mk3 is in “Arturia” mode I only get the Arturia logo when running Analog Lab inside Ableton. No preset names or names for knobs and faders. When I get this issue Analog Lab works fine standalone, so I know it’s a remote script/Ableton related issue. I notice that the MK3 midi devices appear multple times in Ableton. When I get this problem I try removing the device and adding it again and it sometimes works again but I don’t really know if it’s a coincidence or not. I have seen this problem reported multiple times and I am not seeing a fix from Arturia. I have no idea why Arturia don’t offfer separate downlaods for the scripts otherwise fixes will be tied to Ableton releases.

  2. In session mode, if I record automation from a track with Analog Lab (say the cutoff knob) it records with the clip as expected. However, if I switch to another track and play an with Analog lab presets in a different track, the display keeps flashing up with the cutoff automation of the previous track during playback. This is clearly a bug and should only show automation changes for the selected track. May be it should not show automation changes at all? Not sure how useful this is. I will report it as a bug.

Overall I feel top quality hardward and software (V collection) is let down by a shitty python remote script. There is also a lot of room for improvement. For example, it would be nice to hold a button (like a shift button) along with a clip button to stop it playing.

#2

I know that this would not help you directly:
I have very similar issues by using Cubase with the Keylab Essential 49 mk3.
As a workaround, at least with the Cubase integration script, it helps to use the “Prog”-key to toggle between Arturia and DAWs-mode. After doing this the integration seems to work. A second thing that helped always was to reimport the script again (overwrite).

Both workarrounds change nothing regarding the script, Therefor I think that the it must be a firmware problem. (timing?!?)