Older rack gear with new ai apps

[FrankD77]

Although I'm against the copying of software with ai I thought it would be an interesting idea to see if I could get my old gear to work

And to my surprise it "works"
For most of my gear there never was software or the software is outdated.

Because the midi commands are available i threw it into an ai program and to my surprise i now have apps to remote control my old 19" gear on the Mac.

Even made a VST/AU for the mx300

It can take some time to get something that works and it's far from perfect but it works good enough to replace 80% of manual control.

Maybe an idea to share some of these old midi apps that have some better functions than just remote control ?

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

you mean midi control? Or more precise, Bluetooth midi control. AI has nothing to do with it.

CTRLR rack gear works like a VST GUI
MidiDesigner for OSXapple

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

have you discovered Midiquest?

 

[FrankD77]

No i mean exactly what I say
Nothing to do with BT all the gear is connected with midi on midi interfaces.

Midi quest i know and looked at it seriously, and it looks great but it doesn't support all my gear.
For example no lexicon mx300, rocktron series, s400 or g-major support.

So i could only use it only for the 2101 for which I already have midi wizard which dives deep into the 2101.

The ai solutions i build are much simpler and limited. But do exactly what I need when recording just switch the presets and change the settings for all the gear i have.

I don't need to program presets or drag with blocks. Sysex librarian is free and supports all devices for down and uploads.

The nice thing about the au/vsts that i created with ai is that i can place them on the bus and it stores the settings of the gear per project.

Don't get me wrong i don't support copying plugins or whole software ecosystems. That's taking away income from smaller (and larger) businesses. But creating small (limited) custom apps for old gear is one of those positive things about ai.

If midi quest would support all my gear i would have bought that one without a doubt.

 

[rob aylestone]

I'm not quite sure how you've done this, how you got the individual items talking with AI? What exactly has AI produced? An app that can understand MIDI and generate new data to control things the gear is capable of, but there's no translation? A keyboard that spits out say pitchbend and you have an AI app to translate the 0-127 cc into something that changes reverb in the lexicon? Is this what the AI id doing? Custom mapping of one controller to another?

 

[FrankD77]

I was just trying out the following.

Give ai the assignment to find the midi table for the mx300 now build an app where i can change the presets user banks and change settings.

It will give you a HTML version first.
There are limitations. It can't see the display in the data because that's lexicons own system. But i got that working by just asking it to use the list in the manual and user bank numeral.

There is a lot that doesn't work.
Sliders are just the midi commands because it changes per preset. So in essence that's useless.

For me it was the idea to just switch presets and set master mix and store that in my project.

For that it works great.
I'm sure if you dive in and keep adding things or tell it what doesn't work you could build something extensive.

When you're happy you give it the command to build a VST or au from the app or a PKG/exe.

As mentioned im not a fan of many parts of ai. But for this kind of situations it's very handy.

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

I'm not quite sure how you've done this, how you got the individual items talking with AI? What exactly has AI produced?

Right? Being kinda dodgy about it?

I give A.I. tons of shit talk and hate. There is something i really like. You put Explorer in AI mode. ask it directions for FIRMWARE CHECK for a model. It is so hard to get the manual or find it. Then locate the procedure. Now you can just ask.

Easy.

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

If I tell AI to write me a program or algorithm, it cannot. AI is not there yet.

It can barely make a picture for me, but I cannot be specific about anything.

I can ask AI for version check procedures on old hardware, and it is correct some of the time.

 

[FrankD77]

Depends on the ai
I'm building the control apps for the vintage gear with Claude and sometimes chatgtp

It looks great but is often limited if it can't get the midi data. But if it has its pretty easy.

One added benefit I tried downloading something from GitHub for the g major. Couldn't get it to work because it was for Intel Macs. Because all the info is on GitHub it build the M compatibel app in a few steps.

It all depends on the info available.
For my launchpad I created a custom software option to select all modes and scales instead of the limited selection.

I'm not into copying original software. But for a lot of gear there is no software. So in those cases it's hit and miss and you often end up with some things that don't work. But it's better than nothing.

 

[Steenamaroo]

If I tell AI to write me a program or algorithm, it cannot. AI is not there yet.

There's a hell of a difference between firing up your browser and getting the runaround from free Gemini,
and running a context-aware specialised LLM for programming.

I'm not the biggest fan but, for programming, it's there.

I watched a guy review a game engine that claude spat out in something like 24 hours.
You could tell he expected his review to be a bit of a harsh reality take, highlighting common issues and flaws and, instead,
he ended up jaw dropped in disbelief over the extensive working features it had implemented.

He said he'd have been very happy with the output if it had been the product of a small team over several months.

Verify, don't trust, always applies but...it's there.

 

[FrankD77]

Same here. I use it for my old gear.
I have my mx300 now as a plugin in my daw.
Can change everything and it stores the settings per project.

And the s400 never had software just a well documented midi and sysex system. I now have software that never existed

But.... In most cases it's making loads of mistakes. It takes continues fine tuning. But it's easy.

Bad news for plugin companies. So I have a very mixed feeling.

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

lucky my gear has editors and librarians.

 

[FrankD77]

I feel some resistance

And I get it, I just don't get it that people are against EVERY part of Ai use.
For me it has to stay out of the creative process, but if it's faster with "select subject" instead of spending 3 hours with the lasso tool doing the most tedious work ever,. which actually killed creativity, I'm fine.

The genie is out of the bottle and we have to deal with it.
And when I'm honest I think we're in trouble for jobs and businesses. And that's something that is very bad.

So as mentioned I'm 50/50.
Fact is, we have to learn to work with it if we want to keep some form of income in the coming time.
But as mentioned not in the creative part, and I think when you learn how to use to speed up tedious tasks you can actually be successful in creative jobs. The demand for real people work with only grow compared to Ai slop we are bombarded with (and I hate with a passion you would not believe )

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

The genie is out of the bottle and we have to deal with it.

Ha, what genie?

They need to get AI and cure Cancer and Alzheimer's..how about even male pattern baldness?

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

thats my 3 wishes..1 has to be a little selfish right?

 

[FrankD77]

Exactly that.
Let's use the technology for climate change, cure illness, help with science etc.
Instead of wasting all that energy for the next meme that are totally unnecessary.

And make old vintage gear work again of course
I use it in Photography for extending backgrounds or fixing small things I could not do on set.
But I strongly am against "oh you can fix that later". Get it right in camera/DAW and use Ai only to speed up your workflow.

Look at the movie idiocracy, if we are not careful we are going the same way,.

 

[Papanate]

lucky my gear has editors and librarians.

View attachment 153789

How you get Rolands with Built in Ipads?

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

How you get Rolands with Built in Ipads?

Look at the size of that door stop.. It's friggin huge!