Creating standalone MIDI control messages

[bennychico11]

I recently purchased the Tascam US-2400 and was thinking about an idea for it and was wondering if anyone knew how I might approach this.
I wanted to try and do something similar to Digidesign's Control 24 "Vegas Mode" which rapidly moves all the faders and lights up and down....something that makes non-audio people go "Wow!"
I was wondering how I might go about creating a sort of small utility for the computer where it can do something like this. Send out control information when Pro Tools isn't running to flip on lights, move panners/faders, etc. So when people come in and look at the studio I can say "yeah, I'm calibrating the unit" or something. This would be a sort of standalone program. I thought maybe a simple MIDI file set to an valid output on the USB device would work...but it doesn't do anything.

Any MIDI guys think this idea might work?

-B

[altitude909]

Should be easy. Just set the control surface as midi input, move a fader, press a button etc and record while doing it. Make a couple of midi tracks this way, edit it, merge it (control surfaces usually work over 16 midi channels) save as midi file and your done.

Just like doing lighting scenes

[bennychico11]

Originally Posted by altitude909

Should be easy. Just set the control surface as midi input, move a fader, press a button etc and record while doing it. Make a couple of midi tracks this way, edit it, merge it (control surfaces usually work over 16 midi channels) save as midi file and your done.

Just like doing lighting scenes

I figured that that way might work....although, how do I correctly tell Windows to playback the file and send the MIDI data out the USB unit. Windows media player just trys to play it's sounds and when I select the USB unit as the default device is just gives me an error.

[altitude909]

Strange, what error?

I just tried playing a midi file with all CC's via media player and it worked fine.

[bennychico11]

Originally Posted by altitude909

Strange, what error?

I just tried playing a midi file with all CC's via media player and it worked fine.

well, it was first giving me device connection errors...like it didn't know what device I was talking about.
But now they play fine, just no controller data gets sent to the Tascam

[ssscientist]

Originally Posted by bennychico11

I can say "yeah, I'm calibrating the unit" or something.

Let me see if I understand you...

You want a 'midi guy' to help you fool your clients?

Okay, I'll give it a try.

You and Altitude 909 are on the right track, but the reason it's not workling right out of the box is probably because there's a switch you need to flip inside the Tascam that says 'midi cc receive/transmit' or words to that effect.

Find the appropriate page and set that switch to both send and receive all continuous controllers. Then execute the presentation as you want it --- tempo is saved with the midi file, so slow it down to excute and speed it up before you save it.

[altitude909]

You and Altitude 909 are on the right track, but the reason it's not workling right out of the box is probably because there's a switch you need to flip inside the Tascam that says 'midi cc receive/transmit' or words to that effect.

I doubt it accepts anything but midi cc. My tascam mixer has everything mapped off the bat, short of a couple sysex msgs, everything is CC's over 16 midi channels.

In fact, just glancing in my manual all the commands are the same on a channel by channel basis so you should be able just to record stuff for one channel and then just copy it in consecutive clips on consecutive midi channels. They usually dont change that much for midi implementations so it should be close