Any thought of supporting Mackie or HUI control surfaces?

Dorico
#1

OK, I feel a little guilty even bringing this up because there are so many more immediate needs directly related to notation and playback. However, I’d like to mention that control Surfaces, such as the Behringer X-Touch (among many others), play an important role with DAWs. While their applicability to Dorico isn’t quite as direct, there are certainly some things that could be useful. Obviously a control surface can manage the mixer faders and pans. That’s potentially useful during Dorico playback.

More relevant are the transport controls tat are built into practically every control surface. We could use these all the time under Dorico.

And the X-Touch (for example) has a bank 8 function keys that the app can recognize and assign to key sequences. I would certainly map things like “select to end of flow.”, “filter chord symbols,” “filter exclude chord symbols” and so on.

I know there are many priorities, but I thought there might be a chance that Steinberg might already have code available that wouldn’t be too hard to drop into Dorico.

I doubt anybody would go out and purchase a control surface just to use with Dorico, but for those of us who already have control surfaces, it would be cool if Dorico could make some use of that at some point.

Thanks for listening.

#2

It’s certainly something that we would consider for a future version, however it would be substantially more of an effort than just ‘dropping some code’ into Dorico.

#3

One can dream a little. :slight_smile: I know it isn’t that simple.

I only mention it as something to park in deep storage for a time when “the DAW side” of Dorico has primary focus. Clearly there are more immediate priorities. This is an example of the kind of convergence I think we will (or should) see between notation and composition/production/recording in the next decade.

#4

I like that idea … there are a lot of relatively inexpensive and nice Mackie / HUI control surfaces out there, e.g. the Icon Qcon Pro. They come with presets for most common DAWs, including Cubase / Pro Tools / Logic / Reaper etc. Motorized faders, brushes aluminium surface … very nice and well below the $$$$ Avid units.

And there are some nice vintage control / soundcard units like the M Audio Projectmix which have a Cubase preset, which works well for Reaper as well.

So if you can ‘borrow’ some code from Cubase, that would be a nice fancy ass addition to the Play functionality … maybe for version 3 or beyond.

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#5

Nice. I had not seen that one. Street price new about $800, including overlays for the popular DAWs.
https://iconproaudio.com/product/qcon-pro-x/

Even though these products are targeted at mixing on DAWs, they have functionality in some other programs.

For example, I noticed that in a StudioOne Mastering project (not the “DAW” per se), the transport works, of course. But the faders also worked in a way I didn’t really expect. In Project mode, each “track” fader corresponds to a different song in the mastering project. That is not enormously useful because at that stage of the project, one needs to fine-tune the final levels, and there is no advantage in using mechanical faders. But it is interesting that the support works nonetheless.

#6

Several years back, when Avid still owned M-Audio, they released midi keyboards which were integrated with the mixer in Sibelius - M Audio Axiom Pro, such, that you could control the mixer from your midi keyboard. Daniel can probably remember this. Not sure how big of a success this was - it only worked with this specific type of keyboard.

But if you have a more generic type of technologie like Mackie or HUI, it could work with a host of different midi controllers, including motorized touch sensitive faders (those are really nice for mixing). It would really take the Play functionality to the next level, and set Dorico apart from eg Sibeius or Finale.

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#7

Just confirming nothing has changed with this, right? HUI support would be awesome even if only for the transport controls. I’m spending much more of my life in Pro Tools now that I’m stuck at home with no gigs (been writing and playing on a bunch of multitrack stuff) so my the PreSonus Faderport is occupying a permanent spot in my workspace (at least for a while). It would be pretty cool to get it working with Dorico too.

#8

That’s correct, no support for Mackie or HUI control surfaces at the moment, nor is any such support coming imminently, though we would like to add it.

#9

Thanks, I guess I was hoping there was existing Cubase code for this that could be borrowed to help facilitate implementation.

#10

Just wondering if there has been any progress on creating support for control surfaces? Nothing imminent was the steer from Daniel back in May last year - but now we are nearing the end of Jan 2021 any news? Many thanks!

#11

No, I’m afraid there’s been no further development in this area at the moment.

#12

Maybe it would be worth identifying the features that might be attractive if there was an opportunity for development in the future. The obvious one is setting levels and panning for the mixer. That isn’t usually a big priority during the notation process, but it would be useful when trying to produce a quick rendering.

I guess it might be handy to use the transport controls. Personally I don’t think I’d use that much, but others might.

Beyond that, I’m struggling to imagine what would be useful. It seems to me that he Elgato pads are much more useful for Dorico.

1 Like
#13

Thumbs up from me to add it to the “to do” list.