MIDI Designer 1.3.5 is moving through beta testing right now with flying colors! Here’s me playing three Korg Wavedrums at last week’s THroNG session. THroNG is improvised ambient electronic music.
MIDI Designer is the locus of control for my entire rig (along with Line6 FBV Shortboard MKII), of course:
There are two other players on this session: Mike Rosenstark on guitar and the amazing Kevin Brown on bass. Mike’s rig also has MIDI Designer as the centerpiece. He’s using an iPad 3 with MIDI Designer Pro, two Behringer BCR2000’s and two Line6 FBV Shortboard MKIIs. There’s a reason that Mike Rosenstark is called “User #1.” Here’s a pic of his rig.
If you’ve got pics or experiences with MIDI Designer that you want to share, please drop me a line!
1.3.5 is feature-complete and I’m moving my main focus over to testing. This version is really special. It unlocks so many limitations of MIDI Designer that new users will be ecstatic, and current users will blown away.
What’s the big deal?
Features and fixes have been added to accomodate two-way MIDI hardware. For instance, users may use a Behringer BCR2000 as an external MIDI controller for MIDI Designer. See the Ultimate Hybrid page for more information.
LED Colors (affecting all controls, including button-on color) are now selectable per page. With 256 choices the newest MIDI Designer lets you make beautiful pages that are easy to recognize.
Sliders, crossfaders and buttons are now aspect-ratio free and can be huge, tiny or anywhere in between. Most controls have a new design and all are 100% Retina display ready.
Name labels are independently sizable (and supersizable).
New, fixed-width LED font used in many parts of the app.
Automatic reverse colors on Page Tabs, name labels and buttons for darker page colors.
Labels now sit behind all other controls, allowing for watermarks and other effects.
Panes are back! They sit behind labels, and have no border so you can combine them in interesting geometric shapes.
And much, much more…
I’m focusing on getting this version tested, bulletproof and ready for the App Store. Once that happens, I’ll be getting back to playing with MIDI Designer, making videos, twittering (I don’t “tweet”) and explaining MIDI Designer to a wider audience. 1.3.5 promises to be a historic moment for universal MIDI controllers.
Thanks for your patience and interest. A full listing of all new features and fixes is here.
Edit (May 18, 2012): During the alpha testing phase, I decided to remove the “watermarks” feature from this release. In lieu of this, labels now always sit behind controls, giving a meaningful way to label parts of your pages.
I’m absolutely ecstatic to announce that MIDI Designer Pro has won the Sonic Touch Gold Award.
Gaz Williams is using MIDI Designer Pro for a major rock opera production in Paris. Nick Batt, Sonic State Editor, goes over the app with Gaz. As you can tell, these guys have spent a lot of time with the app.
“incredibly well thought-out….”
“very cleverly made, so it’s easy to use…”
“closest rival is Lemur…A lot easier to use than Lemur….”
Great!
Here’s their 10+ minute review of MIDI Designer Pro:
and here’s the article on the Sonic Touch website:
Big shout out and thank you to Gaz Williams and Nick Batt. I’ll take this opportunity to say: we’re not done yet. 1.3.5 is coming out soon, and it’s a game-changer! Stay tuned!
I wasn’t aware of this until Mike Rosenstark pointed it out this morning. You can use Emoji — those cute little emoticons that the Japanese have somewhat standardized (read more in the Wikipedia article) — in your MIDI Designer labels, both on pages and controls.
Even better: you don’t have to pay for this feature. It’s already built into your iPad!
Short Instructions
Turn on the Emoji international keyboard in your iPad settings.
Long Instructions
Go to settings:
Select International:
Select Keyboards:
Tap “Add New Keyboard”:
Scroll down and select “Emoji”:
Now you can switch between keyboards using the “Globe” on your keyboard (to the left of the spacebar):
Now you can use Emoji in controls and page labels!
Note: If you’re using the Japanese keyboard, you can already access Emoji directly, but you probably know that already.
Update 2014-04-18
Emoji don’t size well, but a lot of the great stuff that does scale up can be found in the Kanji and other non-Western keyboards.
Update 2014-06-16
Emoji size perfectly well in iOS 7!
i’ve another question
is it possible create a button that pressed once (turned to red) press “play” in Ableton Live, unpressed, press “stop”?
Sure! I never thought of that, but MIDI Designer allows for a lot of things I hadn’t thought of.
First, make three buttons and one knob like this:
Then use the button group feature to make the knob step through the two buttons at the top. Do this by making the knob a supercontrol, and then giving it two subcontrols: stop and play (in that order, though you can reorder.
Now when the play button comes on, it turns the little play button on. Otherwise it turns the little stop button on.
Then make the big play button a supercontrol of the knob. That play button will just toggle the knob to its max (on) and min (off), which happens to be the little play button (on) and the little stop button (off).
Then I finished this post and I realized that I hadn’t actually tried this out myself with Ableton Live. So when I finally did, it was impossible to map, because I’m always sending out two commands at once (stop-play or play-stop). So I temporarily shut off the knob’s “supercontrol” button, mapped up in Ableton, and put it all back together:
This works! Now you can move the “guts” of the thing behind the big button:
Now when the big button is red, Ableton is playing, and when it’s dimmed, Ableton is stopped.
My brother Mike has posted about Thursday’s THroNG session here, including excerpts one, two and three.
Two of the rigs are using MIDI Designer extensively. Here’s a photo of my drum rig (with Chris Dragotta in the background):
I’m using MIDI Designer 1.3.1, in conjunction with a Line6 FBV Shortboard Mark II (via USB -> Wifi -> MIDI Designer) to control my “rig” in Ableton Live 8. In this jam, I’m using three Korg Wavedrums and one Native Instruments Battery instance as the sound sources. These go through a a mix of Ableton and Guitar Rig effects (using lots of cool signal routing, of course). I’m also using my own custom “lookahead loopers” which use Ableton’s Simple Delay and track routing (trick: a track that feeds back when you turn the looper on).
The other rig is Mike’s guitar setup. Tonight we’ll be going over that setup and incorporating a BCR2000, via the pedalboards feature, with MIDI Designer. The exciting thing is that the BCR2000 is two-way MIDI, so… this’ll be very cool. Photos and/or videos soon!
When I work with MIDI Designer, one of the things I’m trying to do is solve things the way any user would. If that’s not possible, I submit a change request (to myself) and it gets put in a queue and maybe sometime later the product manager (me) puts it in the queue so the development team (also me) can add it to the next release. Joking aside, even if I can get a new feature added and tested in 24 hours, I still would have to wait for Apple’s approval to get it to my users, so that’s a seven-day delay, minimum. Plus, the main goal is to dogfood: I use MIDI Designer as a normal user as much as possible.
Recently, I’ve started working with CamelPhat and CamelSpace in Ableton Live, and both of these plugins allow for Program Changes. This works really nicely as you can see from the video [note that the video is using version 1.3.1 which allows for momentary buttons that step down using an inverted supercontrol]. Basically what you’re looking at is me pressing a program change button and CamelPhat (or Space) reacts and sends all the parameters back to MIDI Designer:
To achieve the program changes with CamelPhat and CamelSpace I need Ableton Live to send MIDI data back to me. This is usually not a problem: MIDI Designer (MD) sends a value and then receives that same value again. If it’s a knob/slider and your finger is on it, MD just ignores the incoming value. Otherwise, it ignores the incoming value because it’s the same as the one it just sent out.
Statement of Problem
Elsewhere in my rig, I have two tracks that I want to alternate (one on or the other on).
So I want Ableton track buttons 30 and 31 to alternate. So I mapped them to one button and the MIDI looked like this:
This works perfectly if I shut off the MIDI feedback that I need for my CamelPhat/Space plugins. With it, however, it’s a mess. MIDI Designer is getting told by the second one to invert the button. The end result is garbage: I need to press the button twice to get it to flip states correctly.
Solution
There are many ways to solve this in MIDI Designer, all of which are variations on the same theme: use two buttons and then “gang” them with a supercontrol. Here’s the setup. Two buttons, one of which is “backwards.” I’m doing this via the MIDI it sends out, which is the most direct way:
One button is dedicated to the first track’s on button, and the second is dedicated to the second track’s on button.
Now I group these with a supercontrol (toggle button):
Tidying Up
I hide the buttons underneath the supercontrol. The end result looks like this (on and off states):
This is a pretty specific problem, but the more general point is interesting: you can solve unique and new problems in MIDI Designer with a bit of creativity.
Later Realizations: This particular problem can be solved in Ableton Live by ordering the tracks so that the one that lines up with the button’s on-off states is to the right of its polarity-backwards sibling. Yet another option…
Note: Production of our own pedalboard is not on the MIDI Designer roadmap… yet. Luckily there are quite on a few on the market that we like, such as the Line6 FBV Shortboard MKII and the classic Roland FC200.
The Pedalboards feature of MIDI Designer is what makes MIDI Designer a true hardware-software hybrid. New complete article on the Pedalboard feature of MIDI Designer is here.
Version 1.3 has been approved by Apple and ready for download!
MIDI Designer 1.3 adds several new and fantastically important features to the Perfect MIDI Controller. Most of these suggestions came from discussions with users.
Ground-breaking:
• Buttons Groups open up worlds of possibilities (Blog Article and Video)
• Channel-Changer Supercontrols can make any control multi-function (Blog Article and Video)
• Renaming, deleting and ordering of presets.
Enhancements:
• Tall and long-throw sliders for more accurate control
• New “Relationships” pane allows you to understand and modify a control’s relationships
And more features and enhancements! Check it all out in the Change Log.
