I am a volunteer at our church, but have worked in IT for about 15 years and also do a lot of maker type tinkering at home. Over the past couple years, I have been using companion (CompanionPi) to help automate many things at our church, well, and at home. I have automated muting and unmuting of channels on our church soundboard, which is used for mixing in-house sound. We utilize LogicPro running on a Mac Studio to mix the sound for streaming. I would like to be able to automate muting/unmuting mics and such in LogicPro. I have been able to get it to work using Midi-Relay, but I would prefer not to have the additional software if not necessary. Also, I would like to get feedback into Companion to be able to tell if the input is already muted or not.
I created a short video also in case that might be helpful in understanding our setup and what I am trying to do. Any direction would be appreciated. Video
Got it.
So, the first thing to find out is whether or not LP not only is receiving MIDI messages but is also sending them. I know LP has the capability of sending MIDI as it works with control surfaces like the X-Touch and moves the faders and changes button states on the controller. The question is whether or not LP is set up to send back MIDI in your current setup.
The easiest way to figure that out will be to use the generic-MIDI module and the Action Recorder.
First, set up the generic-MIDI module so that it can send and receive MIDI to/from LP.
What is the name of the MIDI port you have set up in LP to send/receive MIDI?
Some information is available in the user guide:
Once you know the name of the (virtual) MIDI port in LP, you can enter it in the generic-MIDI module in Companion. After that, you can select the Action Recorder tab in Companion (Buttons page) and enable it for the generic-MIDI module, then try muting/unmuting from LP and see what message(s) are being sent from LP to Companion.
You probably should disable MIDI-Relay module in Companion and quit MIDI-Relay on your computer so the 2 modules don’t fight for MIDI ports.
Once you know the message(s) being sent from LP to Companion, I’ll show you how to use those messages as feedback to indicate on the button whether or not a channel is muted.
I have not. I can’t get figure out how to get midi from the raspberry pi to the apple studio computer. Also, I haven’t been able to figure out how to get Logic Pro to send midi when pressing mute. I am looking at a profile for the stream deck software from SideshowFX that appears to get that. Hoping to maybe reverse engineer what they have done.
What messages did you see on your terminal window after each command that I listed?
BTW, I cannot figure out either how to send MIDI controller messages from LP. It’s easy as pie to receive them using the Learn function, and the settings show where to set the MIDI input port, but I can’t see anywhere that shows how to set the MIDI output port…
Might be part of the controller setup, but it seems to be set up to work with exisiting hardware controllers rather than any kind of user-definable MIDI…
I think it’s going to be Saturday before I can get back to it. I know there’s some messages when running the dpkg command about having too old of versions. I’m guessing that’s why it’s failing and why I think I’d need to go to a newer version of CompanionPi.
I’ve heard of that specific issue before. It was a corrupted install of CompanionPi. A fresh install fixed the issue. @mikemoore had the same issue and a fresh install fixed it. He was running the stable version of CompanionPi.
Oh, I’ve no doubt that LP can send MIDI, it does so with all the hardware controllers it supports. I just don’t know how to make it happen “manually”, so that’s why I’m suggesting you reach out to Apple or a expert-level LP forum for assistance.
I’ve not used MIDI Relay myself, but I would think that if it works with MIDI Relay, there’s no reason I can think of that it wouldn’t work with the generic-MIDI module. Just copy the MIDI settings over?
