Cantabile Development Blog

Button Bank MIDI Filter

Button Bank is a new MIDI filter that allows mapping two ranges of button controllers onto some other MIDI event.

For example say you have two banks of button controllers that you'd like to translate to say a program change event. The button bank controller allows this by combining the button presses from one bank with the button presses from the other (using configurable add/multipliers operations) then sends the desired event.

The above example assumes you have 20 MIDI push buttons. The first set of 10 on MIDI controllers 80-89 and the second set on controllers 90-99. When you press a button in bank A, the filter simply remembers which one you pressed. When you press a button in bank B, the filter generates a program change event. The program number it generates is calculated by this formula:

So say you pressed button 81 then button 93 that would be:

It sounds complicated, but if you think about it, basically you're using bank A as the tens column, bank B as the units and you've got a really quick way to access 100 program changes from 20 buttons.

Of course there's a whole bunch of different ways you could configure this: * each bank is optional so you can use it for a single button bank * if the controller range for a bank only has a single controller, it uses the controller value rather than it's index. This allows other manipulations of controllers to be created. * it's not limited to generating program changes - it can also generate Bank Select+Program Change, Program Change, Bank Select, another Controller, and coarse or fine RPN and NRPN parameter events. * the button controllers don't need to be in order. eg: 10-14,20,8 is a valid definition for 7 buttons.

Button bank controller is available in Cantabile Solo and Cantabile Performer, from build 2008

Posted on January 1, 2009

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