I am about 1 hour old with Bomes.
[edit] will expiriment and research, but simple thing is, I want some of my controller assignments to be diverted to and from a different app from the majority. Its an X-touch (full) primarily controlling Mixing Station but I want tranport control (and TC display) to connect to Reaper instead. I’ve tried a lot of things and cannot get it to work, but also realised I should research a bit more.
Hi and welcome to the Bome community!
This is possible with the following example. I’m assuming your X-touch is in Mackie MCU mode. If it is HUI mode you will need to adjust the transport controls accordingly.
First of all I create aliases as follows. Yours will be your X-touch instead of my nanoKontrol2.
You can learn more about aliases from this tutorial.
In reaper, set up your control inputs and outputs as BMT 2 and Mixing station as BMT 1.
In MT Pro I set up MIDI thru paths as follows:
Any MIDI messages that are not controlled by translators will go through these paths.
Then I set up two presets. with paths as follows:
For more information about device selection, see this tutorial.
Any translators under these presets will follow the MIDI path of the preset only.
I started by creating separate translators for each button but discovered that the MIDI note numbers are sequential (from 91 to 95) so I disabled the original translators and set up a single translator (in each preset) that would handle all transport controls for the whole range of notes. I added the following rules to restrict the translator to only transport controls.
if pp<91 then exit rules, skip Outgoing Action
if pp>95 then exit rules, skip Outgoing Action
90 is Note on MIDI CH 1
pp is the note number
and qq is the velocity
So 90 pp qq is raw midi for Note on, note PP velocity qq.
Now transport controls will go to and from Reaper (BMT 2) and everything not handled by translators will go to and from Mixing Station (BMT 1).
Reaper-Mixing-Station-Split-2023-09-12.bmtp (4.4 KB)
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
Thank you so much. I was thinking I’d have to map every controller twice and swallow everything I didn’t want going to each device. In your first screen shot “Select Midi Device…” window, where do I find that window.
Control is working but I’ve lost all feedback from Mixing Station to the X-Touch. [edit] found it, there’s 2 X-touch ports, the return was set to x-touch 2.
If I wanted to get the timecode from Reaper showing on the x-touch tc display, how would I go about that? Getting values for a button or fader is one thing, but that seems very complicated. This would fall under the nice-to-have category.
Another side request, do you mind if I share this solution with the mixing station community? I think they’d find it very helpful.
Hi, it appears that Reaper does not send timecode back to the Mackie MCU device so with nothing coming in from Reaper, there is not much we can do. If it did, we could set up a translator to recognize the pattern and send it through to your X-touch device.
Yes you can share a link to this thread to any community you wish.
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
Hi Steve,
Thanks. When I connect the X-touch directly to Reaper I get the TC display, either as Bars/Beats or HH:MM:SS:fff as per the timeline setting in Reaper so it is being transmitted.
I searched the internet for the message format and found it right back here:
But it’s still over my head how this would translate to a rule in bomes.
I know the message format but I’m not seeing any timecode from Reaper either in Mackie HUI or Mackie MCU mode.
I’m on v6.81
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
OK, I see that Reaper is sending alternate time code method instead of SyeEx.
B0 4i qq
The following should handle it. Translator 1.6
Reaper is in Mackie MCU mode and not Mackie HUI mode.
Reaper-Mixing-Station-Split-2023-09-13.bmtp (4.9 KB)
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
Hi Steve,
I used this to add a couple more controls for the display type and to add a marker at the play head position.
Reaper-MS-Reaper-split-wTC_v1-1.bmtp (6.2 KB)
Another question, my original plan was to do this using Waves Tracks Live which only supports HUI. Are the HUI transport commands the same? I tried switching my X-touch to HUI and monitoring the MIDI in Bomes but there’s so much traffic I couldn’t really work out what commands were the result of my button press (I only tried Rewind before realising I don’t know what I’m look at). Nothing looked familiar and where it looked like my button press there was 9 CC comands. Tracks Live also uses MMC. Not sure what I could do with that.
The purpose of all this is to have something recording multi-tracks from my XR18 in the background when I’m mixing live bands, without having to leave my live mixing interface (Mixing Station). Tracks Live is great for this as it is all it really does.
No Mackie HUI is much different and more complex than Mackie MCU.
In Mackie HUI everything is divided into zones and ports. There are 29 zones and 8 ports used. You first select a zone, then you turn a port on or port off. Page 15 of the HUI document you sent shows the ports and zones.
The transport zone is 0e (14 decimal). To turn a port on you send a value of 0x4n where n is the port number and to turn it off you send a value of 0x0n.
For instance, for play you send:
// Go to Zone 0e
B0 0c 0e
// Turn on port 4
B0 2c 44
For receive 0c and 2c are replaced by 0f and 2f
To turn off port for in zone 14
// Go to Zone 0e
B0 0c 0e
// Turn on port 4
B0 2c 04
Timecode display messages are shown on page 6 but as I say, it doesn’t look like Reaper is sending timecode in HUI mode.
I could probably help more with this but we are now talking about a paid consulting engagement. Of course if Reaper doesn’t send timecode, there is not much I can do about that in either case.
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz For timecode, the HUI messages appear to be SysEX messages and as I said before, it doesn't look like Reaper sends them in HUI mode.
Thaks Steve. Turns out Waves Tracks Live actually use MMC, not HUI. I managed to get transport controls working from the x-touch to waves tracks live but can’t get it to work back. I think the message are all context sensitive as they do different things depending on the state of other things. This means getting feedback on my x-touch is very complicated. So I’m dropping in the too hard basket and will just go with Reaper instead. Thank you so much for your help on this. I learned a lot. I really appreciate your time and effort sand knowledge sharing.
OK, we can convert MMC to other messages so we would need to see what Waves Tracks is sending back and convert it from MMC to Mackie Transport Messages. I assume you mean by getting this back it means LED’s on your X-touch.
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
Hi, although the Waves MMC implementation is a bit wonky, this might get you close.
The Init preset handles housekeeping of global variables.
The second preset handles conversion of MCU transport to MMC commands for Waves.
The third preset handles conversion of MMC commands to MCU LED’s.
I use a bit map and a timer to update the transport LED’s
wave-test.bmtp (4.9 KB)
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
Yes, I mean LEDs on the X-touch.
I did look at what Waves Tracks Live (WTL) is sending but it seems like it’s not implemented in a straight forward way. For example. Pressing Record just drops it into record ready, and doesn’t record until I press play. MCU doesn’t really reflect this record state.
Another example, When I hit “play” in WTL it sends just a timing message
F0 7F 00 06 44 06 01 00 24 10 08 00 F7
…but not until I press “stop” do I see the expected play message, followed by a stop message
F0 7F 00 06 03 F7
F0 7F 00 06 01 F7
I used this resource along with MIDI monitoring.
synthway.com MMC
So all in all, it’s too fiddly for my level of knowledge, remembering I only started with Bomes a few days ago.
I’m happy to just settle on using Reaper for now. Thanks again for your interest and help.
Yes, even with my years of experience it looks like the Waves implementation is a little wonky so it would take quite a bit of fiddling around.
Here is the site I looked at that talks about the MMC commands.
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
All this is just so I wouldn’t need to switch applications, so not worth the effort to me.
BTW, found this rather help MCU resource too. Control Surface: MCU.hpp Source File (tttapa.github.io)
Sorry. I completely missed the post with the wave-test.bmtp (4.9 KB) earlier. It sort of works but the MCU led feedback is still not consistently representing the actual state of WTL, so it might show as recording when it’s not, which is the whole purpose. I reckon Waves is just to oddly implemented.