Copyright © 2013-2015 MultiMedia Soft How to manage MIDI DJ consoles

Active MIDI DJ Console, through the MidiDjConsole property which encapsulates functionalities of the MidiDjConsole COM object, can interface with external MIDI DJ Consoles and Controllers by receiving MIDI events from the console and by sending MIDI commands to the console itself.

 

 

Connecting the MIDI DJ Console

 

The connection between the console and the component can be started in two steps:

 

 

The the console and the component can be disconnected at a later time in two steps:

 

 

At any time you can know if a connection is established through the MidiDjConsole.IsConnected method.

 

 

Profiling the MIDI DJ Console

 

As you may know, each MIDI DJ Console comes with its own set of MIDI commands for notifying that a button control has been pushed or that a slider control has been moved or that a rotary knob control has been rotated on the physical console; at the same time, each MIDI DJ Console comes with its own set of MIDI commands for switching a led on or off or for displaying numbers on one or more VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) available on the physical console.

 

Due to the fact that each DJ console, also when coming from the same vendor/manufacturer, may use a different set of MIDI commands, Active MIDI DJ Console comes with a set of methods allowing to create, edit and modify profiles (also known as maps) for each of the connected DJ consoles: in this way the container application could virtually connect to any model of DJ console by allowing the final user to create his own profiles or by loading profiles created by other users.

 

Each instance of the control can manage one single profile so, in case the container application should need to manage at the same time multiple connections to DJ consoles connected to the system, there would be the need to allocate more instances of the control.

 

When the single instance of the control is initialized, an empty profile is immediately available for usage so there is no need to create a new one: in case a profile should have already been programmatically filled with items or loaded from a file, it could be emptied through the MidiDjConsole.ProfileReset method.

 

A profile contains the following elements which allow identifying the MIDI DJ Console for which the profile was written:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Items for console's physical controls

 

A profile's item is identified through a string of characters containing its name: when developing a profile you have the possibility to define your own set of names but it's strongly recommended assigning to each item the same name contained inside the technical specifications of the MIDI DJ console. Profile's item can be:

 

 

Each item belongs to a specific type; supported types are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In case a manual action should happen on a physical input control still not added to the profile, the container application would be in any case notified through the MidiDjConsoleEventUnmapped event. Under certain situations, for example inside an application that would allow the final user developing a new profile or modifying an existing one, you may have the need to get an unmapped event also for items already stored inside the profile; for example, if a specific button should be already mapped inside the profile, when pressing the button you would receive the MidiDjConsoleEventButtonPressed event but you would no more get the specific short MIDI command used to map the button; by disabling events for already mapped items you could get the MidiDjConsoleEventUnmapped event for all of the physical controls and, if needed, you may modify the item inside the profile accordingly: this can be done by disabling mapped events through the MidiDjConsole.EnableMappedEvents method. The "ProfileEditor" project available inside the samples works exactly like this.

 

For each item contained inside the profile you can obtain the specific type (push button, led, etc.) through the MidiDjConsole.ProfileItemTypeGet and other information through the MidiDjConsole.ProfileItemInfoStringGet method.

 

At the beginning of this section dedicated to profile's items, we have already seen that we can enumerate items stored inside the profile through the MidiDjConsole.ProfileItemCountGet method in conjunction with the MidiDjConsole.ProfileItemNameGet method: these methods don't make distinctions about the type of control to which the item belongs: if you should need enumerating a specific type of control, for example push buttons only, you may use the combination of MidiDjConsole.ProfileTypedItemCountGet and MidiDjConsole.ProfileTypedItemNameGet methods.

 

If you need to verify if a specific short MIDI command has already been assigned to a specific type of control, you can use one between the MidiDjConsole.ProfileButtonNameGetByMidiCommand method for push buttons (with or without embedded led), MidiDjConsole.ProfileRangeNameGetByMidiCommand method for range controls and MidiDjConsole.ProfileLedNameGetByMidiCommand method for led controls.

 

 

VFD display segments

 

As already mentioned before, displays are usually known as VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) and may contain one or more segments having a certain number of variable characters (each segment allowing to display a word or a very short sentence) and a certain number of leds which may switch on/off a fixed word or character. The image below shows the VFD belonging to deck A of a Denon DN-HC4500 console.

 

 

VFD leds can be switched on/off or blinked by adding them inside the profile as described inside the "Items for console's physical controls" section above; management of VFD segments is a bit more complex and the possibility to display variable words using an embedded character set is quite difficult to profile; the number of manufacturers using this kind of display on some of their console models is quite limited so, for this reason, the component doesn't allow adding VFD segments to the profile but their management is embedded directly inside the control itself.

 

At the moment Active MIDI DJ Console comes with native support for displays of the Denon DN-HC4500 console only: other models may be added upon specific request by sending us the technical specifications of the console.

 

Displays segments can be enumerated through the MidiDjConsole.DisplaySegmentCountGet method in conjunction with the MidiDjConsole.DisplaySegmentInfoGet method; once enumerated you can show single characters or strings of characters using the following methods:

 

 

 

 

A sample of usage of MIDI DJ Consoles profiling and testing can be found inside the "ProfileEditor" Visual Basic 6 and Visual C++ projects installed with the component's setup package.