Vestax VCI-100 owners. Firmware upgrade info.

milltown

Hi Lads,

I recently picked up a VCI-100 and was reading up on it and the firmware revisions. As I mentioned to one or two of you in PMs, if I knew nothing about the bugs in the firmware they probably wouldn't have bothered me but once I found out about them they would drive me mad! My controller had the original 1.1 firmware, the main bug in which was a second or two of a delay between releasing the jog wheels and the track playing again, making vinyl style cuing almost impossible.

Vestax brought out a 1.2 f/w revision which fixed this but somehow missed the fact that two of the buttons were sending out the same signal, the fourth FX button sends out the same midi message as the right headphone cue button. Press one and the other comes on.

DJ Tech Tools released their own 1.3 f/w to iron out Vestax's bugs and add some more features, that I'll admit I don't fully understand yet. Cue copy and paste:

DJTT wrote:

Here are a few of the changes made in 1.3

general improvements:

* Eliminated the problem where the 4th FX buttons trigger other buttons (cue)
* added midi in functionality to the loop buttons
* added a note on to the jog wheel in scroll mode

performance:

* turned the filter knobs into double knobs (0-127 on the left and right side)
* added a "freeze function" to the bottom of each fader and top of the fx knobs. this sends out a 127 message only at the end of the movement
* added inverted messages to the faders (this allows an effect to be turned on by turning the fader down- not possible otherwise)
* added unique values to the FX buttons (these were used for direct FX selection- now added in Traktor Pro)

Soooo... knowing that it would now bother me, I ordered the f/w flashing dongle from DJTT and flashed my controller to 1.3. All is well in the world again and being the lazy bugger that I am I can now use all the DJTT Traktor maps instead of mapping it myself.

God knows when or if the dongle will be needed again so if any of the VCI owners here would like a go of it, drop me a PM or reply here.

No doubt the more seasoned MIDI mappers here will tell me most of the "issues" could be worked around by mapping but I'm just sticking this up as info and to offer my help.

Ta ta.

Sacred_git

hey man how much you selling this for?

milltown

Wasn't really looking to sell it tbh. It might come in handy again sometime and for the €20ish it cost it would be more hassle to arrange a sale and a meeting and possibly have to order another in the future.

I'll reply to your PM now.

DannyKing

Hey man, really nice of you to put that offer out. Did you have the original vci 100. As in the one with 1.1 firmware? Silverish one. I'm just wondering as I'm thinking of buying one. Good price online but I would need to upgrade the firmware. Can you tell me a little bit about it maybe and how you're finding it? I'm used to cdj's 1210's etc and have been out of the game for a while no so any help is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan.

milltown

Yeah, mine is/was one of the original silver ones. I find it great and, as you probably already know there's a huge support community for mapping and mods at djtechtools.com. With the 1.3 firmware on it works exactly like a brand new one. I'm using it with Traktor and tbh I'm barely scratching the surface of what both are capable of. If you can get one for a good price I'd say go for it but maybe budget for a new overlay from DJTT as it can be hard enough to learn your way around a new controller as it is, never mind when lots of the buttons don't actually do what they're labelled as! Or do it ghetto stylee and go for masking tape and biro labels!

FatB

1.4 firmware now available