Not sure if this is the right place to put something like this, I am sure someone will let me know. Anyway…
I’ve been working extensively with the MIDI Remote system using a MIDI hardware controller (AKAI MIDIMIX Pro) and wanted to suggest a small but impactful enhancement related to plugin control mappings.
The current limit of 8 Quick Controls is quite restrictive and doesn’t allow a controller to be mapped in a logical or intuitive way that mirrors a plugin’s layout. Because of that, I often prefer to map controls one-by-one, either directly from the plugin or from the MIDI Remote editor. This works very well—especially for consoles, EQs, and compressors—and using real knobs, buttons, and faders is a game-changer that genuinely feels like working with hardware.
The issue is that even when using Track Focus instead of Fixed mappings, plugin control is still tied to a specific insert slot. This means:
A mapping breaks if the plugin is moved to a different insert slot
Users must either create separate mappings for every slot, or
Always place plugins in predefined slots just to keep mappings working
This makes it difficult to choose plugins based on the needs of the track, rather than the limitations of the insert slot used when the mapping was created.
It would be a very useful enhancement to have an additional focus option such as:
Selected Track + Focused Insert Slot, or
Focused Plugin (slot-independent)
With this, mappings could follow the plugin currently in focus, regardless of where it sits in the insert chain. This would allow users to focus on the creative needs of the track instead of managing insert-slot constraints, and would significantly improve hardware-based workflows with controllers like the MIDIMIX Pro.
Anyway, as @mlib mentioned in the other thread, instead of direct mapping to a plugin parameter in a specific slot, we should ideally make mapping to the general Param 1→8 (or even more) of the inserts viewer entity. Once this is done, we’re no longer concerned about the position of a specific plugin. When its window gets the focus, the remote controller will update automatically.
I want to second that.
I mapped my Softube Console MK II that way to use it for some bx_console VSTs and it works really great; always switching to the plug-in in focus, no matter which Insert slot is used.
Is there some documentation on how you would map those parameters to a plugin control? So if I wanted parameter 1 to control the Input Gain of my SSL Console plugin and parameter 2 to control the same plugins compressor threshold, how would I do that?
I have looked through the documentation and from that can’t really figure out how I would accomplish that.
You would need to use the Remote Control Editor for whichever plugin you want to use. There you can set each parameter slot to whichever plugin parameter you want.
Here’s an example. Say we have the plugin “ModMachine”, here’s how its RCE looks like:
Now, say, we want to the very first param slot to have something else instead of Delay Time. Say we want there the Mod rate. We have two ways of doing this.
We can go to the left pane of the RCE window and choose it from there once we first have set focus to the Param 1:
The second way is to click on the “L” button at the right side of the window. Once we do that, we can move whichever control of the plugin window, and it will be assigned to the Param 1 slot and so on.
Keep in mind that when editing in the Remote Control Editor and you don’t see the changes after hitting “Apply”, it’s often necessary to remove and reload the plug-in to correctly show your edits.
