Avid today announced the release of Eucon 2021.6, introducing amongst other things Custom knob assignments bringing control and consistency to the user experience when controlling plugins from a Eucon enabled device. We have the details.

Custom Knobs (S1, S3, S4, S6, Dock and Avid Control)

Custom Plugin Knobs is probably Avid’s number one requested feature for Eucon. Until now, knob assignments have been set by the developer. A page table of parameter assignments is accessed by the surface and these assignments are fixed and because they are set by the developer, they can lack consistency.

Prior to 2021.6, if you wanted to access parameters assigned to different pages on your surface, there wasn’t a way to bring them together into your preferred locations. The smaller the surface the more of an issue this becomes so for example for users of a single S1 with only 8 parameters accessible at a time this will be particularly useful, especially when controlling complex plugins with lots of parameters like reverbs.

Any Plugin from any EUCON DAW can now have custom knob mapping in EUCON Inserts. In addition, different areas of the surface can have different knob maps, so for instance the Dock/Control App can have one map of knobs and the S1/S3 another.

Setting up knob maps is done by drag and drop in the Avid Control App. 8 knobs for an S1, two banks of 4 for a Dock, 16 for an S3 and so on all the way up to S6. If you do not want to build knob layouts for each area, the system is intelligent and falls back to the ones you have built or the default and is aware of which surface you have connected and are addressing. These new knob maps are stored as xml files on the Workstation and are interchangeable between all current surfaces, from S1 to S6.

As well as Custom Inserts Maps, both the EQ and DYN default Function maps can be rearranged. These are a little different to the Inserts, as there is only one map for EQ or DYN. This ensures that similar controls are always in the same place no matter the plugin.

Meter Strip Designer (Avid Control, Avid Control Desktop)

This feature applies to both the Meters page of the Avid Control App and the relatively new Avid Control Desktop App. With this update, you can design your own meter layouts, independently. Drag in and rearrange the order of all the different information blocks, show the graphs separately or combine them together. In Avid Control Desktop you can still grow and shrink the meter height and resize the window.

More Pro Tools users will be familiar with the dedicated meters page of the Avid Control app for tablets than will be aware of the Avid Control Desktop app. This was released in the 2020.11 Eucon release. It provides the same high-resolution metering as is available in the tablet app but can be displayed alongside Pro Tools on your main monitor.

Pro Tools Auto Match Indicator (Avid Control, Avid Control Desktop)

A small but useful new feature is the Auto Match indicator, which is introduced to both the tablet and desktop apps. These up and down arrow indicators are useful during automation passes and show whether your current automation value is above or below the underlying automation, aiding smoother automation writes by helping avoid any sudden jumps. 

New Buttons On The Channel Page In Avid Control For Strip Controls And Solo/Mute Clear

New Solo/Mute Clear options and a Control dropdown that hold additional channel controls and allow for additional ones in the future

Many Smaller Features And Bug Fixes

From improvements to the footswitch control to Speaker renaming on the Monitoring page, VCA/Folder Spill Lock Master options to Flip mode LED indication, there are many new and improved features and hundreds of bug fixes and performance enhancements across all Surfaces.

The new Eucon update and supporting documentation can be downloaded from the My Products section of you Avid account.

Don’t Update Until Control App Is Available To You

We understand the Avid Control App update necessary to run this new version is coming but taking longer to show up on the App Store. Don’t update until you are sure you can get the new version of the app to run with it.

UPDATED - 02/07/21

In a post on the Avid Control Surface Users group on Facebook, Eddie Jones from Avid reported:

“Amazon rejected our App without giving a reason. We have also not heard back from them yet either. I suspect with the news that Windows 11 will have the Amazon Appstore in it, they have been inundated with new Apps. If you need to roll back EuControl until this is sorted, just run the installer and select remove all apps and then install the previous version. If you have updated the Dock/S1 firmware its OK to leave the new version on”.

So it appears that while inconvenient, this issue is temporary and rolling back to the previous version is straightforward. Of course users of iOS devices aren’t affected by this issue.