Custom MIDI configuration messages

[NickNelson]

Quite a few commercial and DIY (including my own) MIDI hardware devices use MIDI System Exclusive messages to alter their configuration and/or
parameters.

MIDI-Ox will send sysex of course, but so can HW using the 'Custom MIDI Configuration Messages to Send' dialog.

I find this works perfectly well using the 'Test: send message now' button after entering the data you want sent

Unfortunately, if you don't need or want the message(s) to be sent automatically when the MIDI/Audio engines start or stop you have to
delete the message(s) from the list.

Would it be possible to have a further option so that MIDI sysex messages could be typed in, and saved under their alias, but not sent automatically. This way they could stay in the list for future use, but only actually sent on demand.

Nick

[mdyde]

Hello Nick,

Can you give some examples for what you would be trying to achieve by that? I.e. what sort of hardware configuration tasks might you want to use it for and when might you want them to be triggered?

The 'Test: send message now' button was only meant to be used for testing, so I'd have some reservations about including additional functionality that relied on it, or its settings screen, being used for real-time purposes.

If there's a real need for that type of functionality I think we'd probably prefer to make it accessible via control panels and piston toolbars, so that it can be triggered in real-time, from touch-screens or MIDI pistons, etc.

[NickNelson]

Hello Martin,

Typical examples might be changing the midi channel the hardware uses, or the message sent by a particular piston.
This certainly wouldn't be required in real time - just on an occasional basis when initially setting up hardware.

Many of the MidiBoutique encoders for example use sysex messages to alter their parameters.

If it's complicated please don't worry about it. It just seemed that the functionality was already so nearly there.

Nick

[mdyde]

Thanks, Nick.

For that type of thing, i.e. essentially one-off/occasional hardware (re)configuration tasks, I think my preference, in the interests of trying to keep things simple, understandable, consistent and focussed, would be to use external software/hardware such as MIDI-OX, rather than adding dedicated functionality for it in Hauptwerk - sorry.

Since you can save/load sys-ex scripts in MIDI-OX, I'd have thought that would be ideal for what you need.

[NickNelson]

Fair enough.

Nick