crackle usually is associated with bad ram, I'm surprised it worked at all not being installed all the way. Must have made the connections but badly.
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The mixer can be automated for volume, pan, fx send, and individual send. These are controled via sysex and not CC messages. So you would have to have a controller that can do sysex (although most do not and if they do they are tough to program).
From the manual:
Mix Change data will be recorded as MIDI Exclusive. The following are the contents of the exclusive
data.
F0 47 00 44 45 (Event Type) (Pad Number) (Value) F7
There are four types of events.
01 STEREO LEVEL
02 STEREO PAN
03 FXsend LEVEL
05 INDIV LEVEL
Pad numbers A01 ~ D16 correspond to 00 ~ 3F.
Value can be set between the range 00 ~ 64.