I was recently hired to add a new feature to my midi-relay software that allows you to capture MIDI data coming on any MIDI port and send that data back to Bitfocus Companion where you can then store it as a variable or even use the MIDI data as a satellite surface to control buttons directly.
Here’s a video walkthrough:
This should enable a lot of fun things with MIDI and automation!
It’s free so go check it out. If the things I create are helpful to you, a donation to my family is always appreciated: https://techministry.blog/about/
I decided to give some love recently to midi-relay since person after person asked me to make this an easier-to-run app rather than setting up a nodejs runtime.
When I originally created midi-relay, I designed it to run on every OS, especially the Raspberry Pi platform. Thousands of people use it all over the world for all kinds of stuff. Probably because it’s free. 🙂
This software is designed to accept a JSON object via its API and then turn that object into a MIDI command and send it out a local MIDI port. It allows for remote control of a lot of systems by sending the command over a simple network protocol.
Now it’s even easier to use.
It runs in the system tray for easy access.
Some new features include:
a new socket.io API for bi-directional communication
a virtual MIDI port, for loopback uses
an upgraded Bitfocus Companion v3 module
Disabling remote control, if needed
So if you’re a midi-relay user and you want an easy way to run this on your Mac or Windows desktop, go check out the latest release!
If using my software makes your life easier, please consider supporting my family.
If you’ve not heard of Proclaim, it is a presentation software similar in concept to ProPresenter. I’m not a user, but I have had several people write in and ask about how they could control it with a streamdeck, so I though I would share a quick post on how to do this with Companion and the midi-relay software.
This walkthrough will be on the Mac platform.
First, on the Proclaim computer, open the application, “Audio MIDI Setup”.
The Audio MIDI Setup program.
Now, in the Audio MIDI Setup application, go to Window > Show MIDI Studio.
Double click on the IAC driver.
Make sure the checkbox “Device is online”, and click Apply.
Now that the IAC driver is enabled, you need to download midi-relay on the Proclaim computer. You can get it here: https://github.com/josephdadams/midi-relay It is up to you if you want to run it directly from within Node or use a compiled binary. The results are the same.
Once midi-relay is running, you’ll see the terminal output window showing the available MIDI ports.
You can see the IAC Driver Bus 1 listed here.
Now open Companion. It can be running on the same Proclaim computer, or another computer on the same network. In the Web GUI, create a new instance of the midi-relay module.
Search for “midi” in the search bar and the “Tech Ministry MIDI Relay” module should show up.
In the configuration tab, type in the IP address of the computer running midi-relay. If the same computer is running Companion as Proclaim (and midi-relay), you can type in 127.0.0.1.
Now create a new button with a midi-relay action. Choose “IAC Driver Bus 1” for the MIDI Port, and the other MIDI values as you like. Proclaim will detect them in the next step, so the channel, note, and velocity are not too important as long as the note is unique for each action you want to take (previous slide, next slide, etc.)
Now in Proclaim, go to Settings, and click the MIDI Input tab. Click “Add Command”.
Select the command you want to be able to control from Companion. Here, I’ve chosen “Previous Slide”.
There are a lot of options you can control within Proclaim!
Once you select a command, Proclaim will start listening for the MIDI message.
Now go back to the Companion GUI and click “Test Actions” on your button.
Proclaim will detect the MIDI message and apply it to the command.
Repeat this for all the commands you want to control from your streamdeck with Companion and midi-relay.
That’s it! I hope that is helpful! As always, if you need some help along the way, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. If this post or others have helped you, take a minute and learn more about me.
I have had a few people ask if I could post another walkthrough with more precision on setting up midi relay to control Chroma Q Vista (formerly owned by Jands) with their stream decks.
Bitfocus Companion installed and running on a computer/device (it can be the same computer running Vista, or another computer on the network)
To set it all up:
First, you will need to set up the loop-back MIDI port. Open Audio MIDI Setup. It’s in Applications > Utilities.
In the Audio MIDI Setup window, choose Window from the top menu, then Show MIDI Studio.
This opens the MIDI Studio window. You will see a few options here such as Bluetooth, IAC Driver, and Network. Depending on how you may have configured MIDI ports in the past, the number of devices here can vary.
Double click the IAC Driver device. This will open the Properties window. The main thing you need to do is click the checkbox for “Device is online” (if not already checked). You may also want to change the device name to Vista.
You can close out all of the Audio MIDI Setup windows now.
Now you need to start midi-relay running. Open a Terminal window and change directory to where you put the executable file for midi-relay. I put mine in a subfolder within the Documents folder. It’s important that you run the executable while the Terminal window directory is the same folder the executable is in, or things may not work correctly. Once you’ve changed directory to the correct folder, you can drag the executable file from Finder to the Terminal window, or you can type in the executable name manually. Hit enter to run it.
When midi-relay starts up, it will give you a read-out in the console of all the available MIDI in/out ports. You should now have one that says Vista Bus 1.
Open Vista. Go to the User Preferences menu by selecting File > User Preferences.
Go to the MIDI tab.
Under the MIDI Show Control section, set the Device ID to 0 (zero).
Under the External MIDI Ports section, check the box next to the Vista Bus 1 MIDI port.
Click OK.
In Vista, right click on the cue list you want to use with MIDI control, and choose Properties.
Go to the MIDI tab.
Now open the Companion Web GUI on the computer that is running Companion.
Add a new instance by searching for Tech Ministry MIDI Relay.
In the instance configuration, type in the IP address of the computer running Vista and midi-relay. If you’re running Companion on the same computer, you can use IP address 127.0.0.1.
Click Apply Changes.
To Send a MIDI Note On and advance a cuelist:
Add a new button in Companion.
Add a new action to that button, using the midi-relay action, Send Note On.
Under the options for this action, choose the Vista Bus 1 for the MIDI port.
By default, it will send channel 0, note A0 (21), with a velocity of 100. Vista does not look for a specific velocity value, only channel and note. Vista will listen to any channel by default, but if you set a specific channel in the Vista MIDI settings, you will need to make sure you send the correct channel from Companion.
Go back to Vista and in the Cuelist Properties, MIDI tab, click Learn next to the Play item. The Play command is what advances a cuelist. The Learn function will listen for incoming MIDI notes and makes setting the MIDI note slightly easier (and it proves that it works). You can also just set the note manually if you want.
Go back to Companion and click Test Actions (or press the physical button on your stream deck if you are using one), and the Learn box in Vista will go away, and you’ll see that the note you sent from Companion is now populated in the Vista settings.
Now every time you press that button in Companion, it will advance that cuelist. If you have multiple cuelists, you will need to use different MIDI note values.
To Send a MIDI Show Control message to go to a specific cue in a cuelist:
Add a new button in Companion.
Add a new action to that button, using the midi-relay action, Send MSC Command.
Choose Vista Bus 1 for the MIDI port.
The default Device ID is 0 (zero) but if you changed that in Vista, make sure it matches here.
The Command Format should be Lighting – General and the Command should be Go.
The Cue field should be the specific Cue Number in Vista of the Cuelist you want to control.
The Cue List field should be the specific Cuelist Number in Vista.
Now every time you press that button in Companion, it will go to that specific cue in that specific cuelist.
Here’s a walkthrough video of these steps:
[wpvideo HZriRGlS]
I hope this is helpful! If you’re using MIDI relay, feel free to drop a comment and share how it is working for you!
Back in the summer, I posted about a project I had recently finished, which involved sending HTTP requests to a server that would then relay a MIDI output message based on the request that was sent.
We’ve been using that software (dubbed midi-relay) since then to be able to control our Chroma-Q Vista lighting desks remotely across vlans by using stream decks running Companion. It works pretty well, especially since the midi-relay software is configured to run directly on the lighting consoles upon startup. We have even set up a few crontab entries to send CURL commands to the light desks to turn them on at certain times when we don’t want to be on-site just to press a button.
In anticipation of completing my most recent project, “LiveCaption“, which takes audio and transcribes it to text in real-time, I started working on midi-relay 2.0: listening to MIDI input and using that to trigger a response or action.
I figured it was time this thing had a logo.
In both auditoriums at my church, we have Avid S6L audio consoles. These consoles can do a lot, and like most consoles, they have GPIO pinouts to allow you to trigger things remotely, whether as an action originating from the sound console, or externally that then triggers something on the console like recalling a snapshot, muting an input, etc.
Stock photo of the console I found on the Internet.
These are (some of) the I/O pins on the S6L console. It has GPIO and MIDI ports. We use the footswitch input for setting tap tempo.
I started looking at the possibility of using the GPO pins on the console to trigger an external action like sending an HTTP request to Ross Dashboard, Companion, etc. However, there are only 8 GPO pins on this audio board, so I knew that could be a limiting factor down the road in terms of the number of possible triggers I could have.
The S6L also has MIDI In and Out, and through the Events section of the console, it can be used as either a trigger (MIDI In) or an action (MIDI Out) on just about anything.
The Events page on an Avid S6L console. All kinds of things can be used as triggers and actions here! In this particular event, I’ve created a trigger that when the Snapshot “Band” is loaded, it sends MIDI Out on Channel 1 with Note 22 (A#0) at Velocity 100. MIDI-Relay then listens for that MIDI message and sends an HTTP POST request to the LiveCaption server to stop listening for caption audio.
We already have a snapshot that we load when we go to the sermon/message that mutes things, sets up aux sends, etc. and I wanted to be able to use that snapshot event to automatically start the captioning service via the REST API I had already built into LiveCaption.
In the previous version, midi-relay could only send Note On/Off messages and the custom MSC (MIDI Show Control) message type I had written just for controlling our Vista lighting consoles. With version 2.0, midi-relay can now send MIDI out of all of the channel voice MIDI message types:
Note On / Note Off
Polyphonic Aftertouch
Control Change
Program Change
Pitch Bend
Channel Pressure / Aftertouch
It can also send out:
MSC (MIDI Show Control), which is actually a type of SysEx message
Raw SysEx messages, formatted in either decimal or hexadecimal
And, midi-relay can now listen for all of those channel voice and SysEx messages and use it to trigger one of the following:
HTTP GET/POST (with JSON data if needed)
AppleScript (if running midi-relay on MacOS)
Shell Script (for all OS’s)
There are a few software and hardware products out there that can do similar things, like the BomeBox, but I wanted to build something less-expensive and something that could run on a Raspberry Pi, which is exactly how we’ve deployed midi-relay in this case.
Here is the Raspberry Pi running midi-relay, connected to the MIDI ports on the S6L via a USB to MIDI interface. It tucks away nicely at the back of the desk.
Now we can easily and automatically trigger the caption service to start and stop listening just by running the snapshots on the audio console that we were already doing during that transition in the service. This makes it easier for our volunteers and they don’t really have to learn a new thing.
The documentation is pretty thorough if you want to use the API to send relay messages or set up new triggers, but you can also use the new Settings page running on the server to do all that and more.
From the Settings page, you can view available MIDI ports, add/delete Triggers, view detected midi-relay hosts running on the network, and send Relay messages to other hosts.
And if you’re a Companion user for your stream deck, I updated the module for Companion to support the new channel voice MIDI relay messages as well! You’ll need to download an early alpha release of Companion 2.0 to be able try that out. Search for “Tech Ministry MIDI Relay” in Companion.
Here’s a list of the Raspberry Pi parts I used, off Amazon:
I hope this is helpful to you and your projects! If you need any help implementing along the way, or have ideas for improvement, don’t hesitate to reach out!
At my church, we use Chroma-Q’s Vista lighting platform (formerly owned by Jands). It’s a great platform and easy for volunteers to execute pre-programmed lighting cues. Every large worship space we have on campus with a lighting system runs some version of Vista, whether on a physical console or a PC.
We generally program our lighting to use one or two cuelists and volunteers just advance cue by cue within that list for the service. It’s pretty straightforward and works well for them.
Sometimes, we need the ability to advance cues in a list remotely, when we’re not near the lighting console, and that’s where this latest project began.
Most lighting consoles can be controlled using some form of MIDI command. Older ones require a physical connection, others can use network connections. By using a loopback/virtual port, Vista can receive both MIDI notes and MIDI Show Control commands.
A lot of people have been able to accomplish this type of remote control over the network using a protocol called RTP-MIDI. This protocol is very easy to use and computers can broadcast/discover each other over the network, so it makes it a lot quicker to get up and going.
This is great, and I’ve used it, but I wanted to design something particular for our needs. (1) I wanted something I could run on any PC or Mac to accept commands from a wider range of sources, and so many devices nowadays can send HTTP requests. (2) I wanted something that primarily triggered over TCP, because while RTP-MIDI is great and fast, it uses UDP traffic that can’t cross vlans/subnets. TCP traffic easily can.
So, I broke this project down into two parts: a server that listens to HTTP requests and relays local MIDI, and a module for Companion that allows the Stream Deck to send requests to that server. The server is flexible to support other devices that may want to trigger it, and the Companion module is perfectly paired to work with it.
The server runs a simple REST API that returns a list of local MIDI ports and can accept Note On, Note Off, or MSC (MIDI Show Control) commands. It accepts JSON data via HTTP POST which is then used to build the hexadecimal data and send the MIDI commands.
The HTTP side of things in Node.js uses the Express framework. The MIDI side uses the Jazz Soft JZZ.js library.
The server runs directly on the Vista computer to relay the MIDI commands on a virtual MIDI port which Vista is listening to.
Here is a video of it in action!
[wpvideo ZvMtBNPa]
If you want to do this yourself, setting up the Vista side of things is pretty straightforward.
First, if you are using Vista on a PC and haven’t already, downloaded LoopMidi, you can get it here. It’s free software that creates a virtual MIDI port on the PC.
Once that is configured, open Vista and go to the MIDI settings in User Preferences.
Under the MIDI tab, select the External MIDI port “LoopMidi” (or whatever you named your port). If you’re going to be using MSC, be sure to make note of the Device ID you select.
If you want to advance a cuelist using MIDI Note On commands, right click on the cuelist and under the MIDI tab, select the Note you want to send for the “Play” command.
I hope this is helpful for you! You can dowload a binary release of the MIDI-Relay server from my Github. It’s available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The Companion module will be made available in a release build at some point.
