Official comment
As you can see from the shift mode, this rotary encoder sends MIDI data in two different ways:
- With shift, it sends either a MIN of MAX value (1 or 127), depending which way it's rotated; every time you rotate the knob another click, it sends the same value - if the software is set to receive this kind of data, it knows each "click" to increment to the next step. This allows for continuous rotation through more than 127 values. Great for many things.
- Without shift, it sends an absolute rotation, with values ranging from 0 to 127 (7F in HEX). A range of 128 values divided by the 11 possible beat options (1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1/1, 2/1, 4/1, 8/1, 16/1, 32/1), each has 11 or 12 values from that control assigned to it... and there's a reason for this (which I'll get to in a second). This means yes, you would need to turn the knob through 11 or 12 clicks in order to get to the next beat option. What sucks is that you have to turn the knob a lot in order to get from one value to the next, but what's good about this is you could then manually assign buttons to jump directly to those values. For example, if you want to instantly jump to the 1/1 timing, using a MIDI value of 64 for that input channel would change the beat FX timing from whatever you were at to 1/1.
So, which is better? I'm torn between both, because I see the desire to quickly and easily rotate through the options one click per option, but if it were coded that way (to receive incremental bumps to change option), it wouldn't allow direct beat buttons to be assigned ... which is how it's done on other controllers.