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!

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.