Many of you are asking us for tons of cool new features and more devices to control with your finger. And we love adding major new features to Photon as we will soon do with MIDI.
The good news is that many of you asked us for a way to connect Photon to a MIDI input source.
You wanted to use it with a keyboard, a control pad (MIDI Implementation), a timecode software (Timeline for MP3), synchronization with robots (Launch scene with perfect sync) or even events in a virtual world (via Unity and Unreal Engine) and very big screens with Disguise media servers (Feature Requests/ideas) . And I forget many others… Such geeks !
You are very very creative and that motivated us to do our best to integrate this protocol.
Connect your MIDI keyboard (USB, Bluetooth or through the network) to control your Live dashboard widgets with physical buttons and sliders. To do so, go to Photon’s “Live” view, edit a button or a fader and select “MIDI Input” to map a key of your MIDI keyboard to the widget.
I need you !
Now that we are so close to the goal we need testers, people ready to take this last step with us ! We have released a BETA and would love to hear your feedback and notice us any bugs you would find.
It will be thanks to you and the community that we will succeed in the making Photon 2.3 the best DMX app on iPad (and keyboards)!
Contact me by PM or reply to this thread, I’ll give you an early access to Photon 2.3
Beta loaded. It recognizes Onsong2020 as a MIDI source (I think). Just need to figure out how to get Photon to see/hear messages I’m sending.
Are there only certain classes of MIDI messages it can listen for? Can you share a “known working” message that we can use as a test? In my particular application the MIDI source can send any of these formats: Onsong MIDI Events
I don’t know this app. The good news is that SongOn 2020 is connected like a MIDI interface. To map a key to Photon, your app as to emit a MIDI signal (for example a note). Then Photon will learn the key and bind it to the button or slider. Are your sure that is app is a MIDI output emitter (to send signals to Photon) and not only a MIDI receiver ?
I don’t download this app so it is difficult for me to try it…
Tell if if you don’t find anything working, I will try to understand this app more.
In this example I go to Photon and enable MIDI for a button. Photon is waiting. I then go to OnSong and have programmed a midi message to be sent when I swipe to the 1st song (you can see it flash over the screen). When I return to Photon it still says “last midi event:none”.
Ok I understand !
It is because the app not received events when it is in background, that is very sad… we have to find a way to ensure that the app will received the message in background. Thank you for the video, it is easier to troubleshoot.
I found a way to do it ! It is not very intuitive but it can help you for the moment.
You can launch OnSong app in multitask mode like I did on this video.
Great. Now I have “Note D-1” associated with my Live Button “Preset Beat Snap”. I put Photon into Live Mode. When I send the MIDI message from Onsong shouldn’t the button in Photon activate showing that “Preset Beat Snap” was toggled on by the receipt of the MIDI message? It currently does nothing.
It should activate your button if it was not activate before.
I saw that your button have a trigger mode « Toggle » so each time you send a MIDI signal your button should turn on or turn off. I have to try it with live mode and tell you if I successfully reproduce your use case.
I promise you that it will work perfectly with SongOn in the end
I tried a different Midi message and now the button responds by toggling on or off when the message is sent. Works both in Live and not Live mode. Not sure that Photon acts on the change in the background until brought to the foreground. (See screenshot and video link below)
I think it’s now working with Photon in Live mode in the background. See video of 3 different songs, issuing 3 different midi mesages, triggering 3 different presets/sequences.
Yeahhh !! That’s really great ! I am happy that is it is working fine.
I am working on another way to allow to map keys without using the multicasting but it is not simple.
Will you be doing a show with Photon + SongOn soon?
Don’t hesitate to tell me if it works well or if you have any ideas to improve the use.
I did some preliminary testing of 2.3 with Multitracker. It kinda works. I have Beta 2.3 responding to some midi notes while running in the background. My biggest issue is mapping the midi notes. Multitracker is a midi file player with no ability to edit and no piano roll to manually send the note to be mapped. Currently I’m starting the midi file and pausing it to map a note, hoping the last note played hasn’t already been mapped.
What I need is a way to manually enter the midi mapping note in Photon.
Clément here, co-founder of Photon
MIDI, we did it ! Well almost…
!
I need you !
