[LAU] $3 MCP MIDI controller

[Len Ovens]

On Fri, 17 Apr 2015, Johannes Kroll wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Apr 2015 22:10:40 -0700 (PDT)
> Len Ovens <len at ovenwerks.net> wrote:
>
>> Take a second keyboard from the dollar store (mine is USB) add a driver
>> and it can control the DAW.
>> http://www.ovenwerks.net/hardware/index.html
>>
>> I get 5 channel strips and enough keys left to emulate al the rest of the
>> mackie controller keys with one or two left over.
>
> That's a nice hack. Is the code available somewhere?

It will be. I have finally gotten in contact with the original author of 
actkbd. Because he is not familiar with jack/midi he would prefer not to 
wrap this up into his program but have me fork my own. (there are some 
parts he would like to cherry pick though) So I have to do some name 
changes and clean some things up. midikbd will be the new name, but all 
the actkbd commands will still work too. So it would still be possible to 
have a keypress run a script if desired. I do need to redo the 
documentation as well. I also fear that my crude attempts at realtimeness 
are less than they should be. I have not seen any xruns show up, but I 
don't have any memlocks for the variables I use for the faders, cc and 
LEDs. If you think about it, this is not a lot of memory, 3 LEDs, 16 
Faders/pitchbend max, and 127 cc max though I think I allow for 50 because 
two keys are used for each cc and the keyboard has just over 100 keys :)

However, as soon as I at least do the name change, I will release the src.

I would also like to be able to send something to Ardour on hookup that 
says "init me". Ardour already does this if I have hooked up the 
controller and then restart Ardour. But if I start the controller after Ardour is 
running, I have to do a bankup/down to load the current fader/pan values.

I have also been trying to make something that will show what an MCP would 
show on it's display... however, it seems sysex events are not available 
via jack_midi_event_get, even the 15byte ones Ardour uses to write display 
info. Either I am missing something or I need to parse the buffer on my 
own. This whole thing is a learning thing for me... one step at a time.

I am doing this separately from midikbd because I am thinking it could be 
helpful for BCF2000 users as well. Having the "sribble strip" on the 
screen may not be that useful, but the control names (pan or fader) and 
their values could be a plus. (at least it would indicate that flip has 
been pressed :)

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net