nanoKONTROL: Mappings in music programs vanish [SOLVED]

[dj4am]

It seems I've stumbled across a bug - I'm using a nanoKONTROL with Torq 2.0. Avid, as you know, has stopped selling and updating Torq since, well, they're out of business.

The nanoKONTROL drivers display the name of the device as "nanoKONTROL 1 SLIDERS/KNOB" (or, if i turn off device numbering from the driver settings, just "nanoKONTROL SLIDERS/KNOB". The problem comes in with the "/" in the title - as Torq (and apparently other programs which mysteriously loose mappings, based on posts I've seen around the internet) closes and tries to write the settings file for each device, it attempts to name the file based on the device name; such as "USBXponenetAssignments.xml" for the Xponent device's settings.

Because of the slash "/" character in the name, this results in an illegal file name! The file is never written, and I lost my mapping after every session and was tearing my hair out!

There are two fixes for this:

1. I can export my settings after every session, then import them every startup. This is inconvinient and lengthens my setup time. Most people would probably do this if their software offers the option, and grumble about how Korg products act funny because their other devices work fine.

2. Being tech savvy, I created a folder in C:\Users\{myself}\AppData\Local\Avid\Torq\UserAssignmentFiles\ called "nanoKONTROLSLIDER". Low and behold, Torq saves a file called "KNOBAssignments.xml" inside with all my mappings, and now works perfectly (Torq removes spaces but not other special characters). The "/" is fooling Windows' file system into thinking that Torq is asking for this folder to be there, but it's only a result of the way the nanoKONTROL identifies itself! The file never writes because Windows passes back a "folder not found" error. On app shutdown, Torq silently fails when this happens; and users never know about it.

If Korg would update the driver for the nano series to remove any "/", "\", or ":" (or really, anything besides alphanumerics and spaces), you would magically solve this problem for many users of your products who are experincing this same issue and might not have the programming background which allowed me to catch this. It's not just Torq which has the issue; search the web and you will see here and there random posts about music programs mysteriously forgetting nanoKONTROL settings...

PLEASE, Korg, in the future, only identify your devices using characters which are not know reserved characters by any filesystem. Really, it should have been up to the developers of Torq to have realizsed that USB devices can identify with characters which are illegal to use in filenames, and filtered their string values first like they did with the space character being removed (Little Bobby Tables comes to mind, if you're a reader of XKCD).