Quick way to create MIDI control assignment for playlist?

[SoundRehabAustria]

Hi!

According to the current manual, there are only 2 ways of creating MIDI control assignments for the playlist: global (which is limited to 128 scenes due to MIDI limitations) and individual (which you need to MIDI learn for each scene).

Currently I'm splitting my head about how to best set up a general playlist that works with many songs (25+) having 10 scenes reserved per song, something like in the table below ... Song number would be e.g. MIDI CC number and value 0 to 9 would be reserved to trigger scenes for this song.

Song # Pre Intro Verse 1 Bridge 1 Ref 1 Verse 2 Bridge 2 Ref 2 Verse 3 Outro
0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
2 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
3 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
4 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
5 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

I would like to do some sort of systematic patch assignment because I need to be able to implement and maintain this in the audio software that sends the MIDI messages, however performing 250+ MIDI Learns for 25 songs will take me a while ...

Any smart way to tackle this?
Any drawback for using CCs for that (as regards controlling scene content via MIDI)???

Your help is much appreciated.

[Magic]

Interesting question . Since you have 250+ scenes, you can't use global MIDI control for all of them, and the individual assignments would definitely be pretty tedious (although not impossible).

You could use global control for the first 128, and then use individual assignments for the rest, but that would still be pretty tedious.

The easiest solution would probably be to split your scenes into 2 or more separate projects, making sure to have no more than 128 scenes in each one, and then you could use global control for everything. Is this possible for your situation?

Or, is it important for you to be able to jump around arbitrarily in the Playlist? If not, have you thought about only using the Next and Previous buttons? These are MIDI-assignable as well. As long as you stick to the exact order of the playlist, you would only need to deal with 2 assignments, and just use them to move forward and backward.

[SoundRehabAustria]

It is indeed important for me to be able to jump around arbitrarily in the Playlist ... we are using a playlist in the audio software that allows us to change song sequence on the fly. hence, i was thinking about reserving 10 Magic scenes per song (even if I don't use them all) and access scenes directly via MIDI. Having some consistent logic behind is important so that I can quickly remember what MIDI message triggers which scene (e.g. song "14_supergirl" would send using MIDI CC 14 and value = 3 would refer to scene 143) ...

Anyway, I think of a quick way to MIDI learn Magic scenes. I probably play MIDI notes on a keyboard and use a MIDI translator to change MIDI note to MIDI CC, and learn it in Magic ...

What I'm not so sure yet: whether I should got for CC or something else (aftertouch?) ... I do not want to do all the assignment and then discover that I need the CCs for controlling the show parameters.

[SoundRehabAustria]

OK, just tried the MIDI CC route but hadn't realized before that it does not care about the value that is send along ... hmm, need to come up with a different idea / logic to relate song cues and Magic scenes ...

[Magic]

Yeah, unfortunately I did not make MIDI Learn sensitive to value in the Playlist, mainly because it's hard to get an exact number using a knob/fader/etc. from a hardware controller.

However, there is another potential solution which you should definitely investigate. Have you played with the InputSelector and/or MultiMix modules? These let you choose which input(s) to draw, and you can control them by MIDI. So what you could do is have one main scene per song, and then inside the scene, you could use the InputSelector or the MultiMix module to draw only certain things for certain parts of the song. Make sense?

You can take a look at the "LayersExamples" sample project if you want to see how the InputSelector works. And MultiMix works in a similar way, except that it does a fade between inputs instead of a hard cut.

[SoundRehabAustria]

Hi! Just gave your suggestion a try and yes, this is VERY helpful and will make the whole setup way more intuitive. Now I think of one scene per song triggered by simple MIDI prg chg and using MIDI CC#1 values to switch between input of InputSelector/Multimix.

Is there any way I could use modifier operations to create transitions between MultiMix inputs even if it only receives integer numbers i.e. if it is currently set to 1 and receives 2, it takes two seconds to gradually go from 1 to 2?

[SoundRehabAustria]

Is there any way I could use modifier operations to create transitions between MultiMix inputs even if it only receives integer numbers i.e. if it is currently set to 1 and receives 2, it takes two seconds to gradually go from 1 to 2?

OK, got it. Just need to use average. works fine between adjacent scenes IDs.

[Magic]

OK, got it. Just need to use average. works fine between adjacent scenes IDs.

Yup, that works. Smooth would work too.