Midi show control

Hi guys,

I'm just starting to dabble with midi show control. We have a novation launchpad S that isn't being used, so I thought I would give it a shot and see if I can use it as an extra button wing. I brought it home and hooked it up to my laptop via usb cable and loaded my show file on the dot 2 onPC software. It took me a few minutes of reading, but the programming was pretty straight forward. I was able to map out all of my buttons in the remote input menu pretty quickly and everything seemed to work fine. When I returned to work, I set things up the same way (midi board to PC via usb cable) and linked my onPC software to the console. When I do this, the midi board works for a few minutes, but it will randomly become unresponsive and stay that way until I restart the onPC software and restart the midi board. Do I need to go directly to the midi input on the console for it to work correctly? On a side note, I would like to set my buttons on the midi board to toggle the button LEDs on/off. One problem I ran in to: some executors buttons that contain similar presets turn each other off as they are toggled, however the LEDs on the midi board will stay lit up regardless. Is there a way to make the LEDs on the midi board mirror active executors? I tried the midinote off command and programmed it into an individual cue. It works for turning off 1 other button, but is there a way to tie together more than one of these commands per cue? Any help is appreciated, thanks guys.

Sorry, I wasnt very clear in my first post. I was not trying to connect the midi board directly to the console usb. I was running it as you described.. Through the pc via usb ran as slave and it would randomly freeze up and become unresponsive. My question was should it work correctly this way or do I need to use a different midi cable and go directly to the MIDI in and out ports on the back of the console? Now, I have a new problem.. since I updated to version 1.2 I can not get the onpc to network with the console. I have not had a problem with this until upgrading to 1.2. In order to revisit midi I now have to figure out whats causing the networking issues.

In regards to midi feedback, what is the point of having midi show control capabilities without button feedback? I don't mean to sound condescending, but without button feedback how can you tell what buttons are currently on and off? Seems like the only thing I would be able to use it for would be flash buttons, or something that will not turn off other executors. For small shows I use compu show with an apc midi controller and it runs flawlessly, turning on and off buttons, and basically mirroring whatever happens in the sofware. If midi is not bidirectional, how is this achieved in other brands of dmx software? Seems like there should be a less complicated way to approach this in dot 2.