Is there a way to send text strings to MD?

Question

ie, make a Label, but give it a reference code, then you might be able to setup  a host-side sysEx command to send the ref code and a string, which then could update the label.

Good only when  you're the programmer of the host, but it sure would be cool to be able to send status info to MD.  In my case, I'm controlling my graphics engine, so I could send the name of the current texture, name of the current shape, etc, and see it on the iPad, etc...

Comments

I can not vote up, so I'm writing.. That will be really nice, imagine you open your project and track names are reflected in MD, it would be very handy for me. Sadly ableton does not support sysex, it may be encoded with the velocity values of note off messages 0x80 as usual zero terminated strings. The pitch value of a messages should match some id assigned to a control on MD. And I can write simple Max For Live device which observes the track names and send them to MD if you implement it!)

Answer 1

Hi and thanks for your suggestion. This will happen eventually but probably not before Fall. It would be a LOT nicer if you could find me a standard (via sysex, I assume) for how to encode the characters and what kind of encoding is correct, etc. And then there's the Emoji issue ;)

Thanks!
Dan

Comments

I would also like to see this functionality added in the future. As far as standards are concerned I don't believe there is a standard as such. Mackie control (used originally by logic but implemented in ableton live amongst other daws) uses a set of sysex bytes including the manufacturer Id a couple of other bytes signifying the display being written to then the length of the string being sent to the LCD. The string message itself is ASCII as bytes. The protocol for mackie is readily available online.

Most recently I have utilized abletons push sysex from ableton live to display the LCD contents on an android app so again I know that it is quite simple to decode for display on a label in MD. Again this uses sysex consisting of 4 bytes and then the 68 byte representation of the string in ASCII bytes.

I guess MD would need some rule to either identify which protocol to use and then display the ASCII bytes as characters on the label or allow the us to specify the manufacter ID and some other byte (representing which LCD display this is or in the case of push which line of the LCD). From there a starting index to decode the bytes to ASCII and how many bytes to convert.

Lastly there are hardware specific implementations such as those used by korg which again have a number of sysex bytes representing the characters in the string.

In all cases, regardless of the hardware/protocol used display data has always been bytes representing ASCII chars.

Answer 2

Hi and thanks for your suggestion. This will happen eventually but probably not before Fall. It would be a LOT nicer if you could find me a standard (via sysex, I assume) for how to encode the characters and what kind of encoding is correct, etc. And then there's the Emoji issue ;)

Thanks!
Dan