Mackie Hui & Mcu

Hi, I’ve discovered Renoise after a long time in the traditional DAW world. Having native HUI and MCU support would go a long way in bringing these users to the fold! This way, one can use their keyboard for dedicated control of musical functions, while keeping the mixer and transport it’s own thing.

HUI and MCU protocols can be obtained from Loud Technologies here or here. Or you can dig into the Reaper SDK to find details. With that and a patient Google and online forums search, you can find enough info to piece together other users’ reverse-engineered findings, like this.

Have you already tried Duplex??

I tried to make Mackie Control layout for duplex here (the control-map is included in the latest duplex beta version already). I think your request may be fulfilled “to some degree” by using it. ;)

But please understand, current duplex doesn’t support relative encorder, so you cannot use panning knobs and jog dial.

Also, the latest duplex 0.98b18 seems to have tiny bugs (lighting update for solo & mute buttons), so please wait the next duplex release (0.98b19 or official 0.98 stable version maybe). Well, you can try using it even in the duplex 0.98b18 though.
(fixed in 0.98b19)

Cool, thanks I’ll try that Duplex–if it’s MCU however it may not work with HUI, but that is halfway there!

In the meantime, I found the ultimate HUI guide, while searching for footswitches, inexplicably: http://www.ssei-online.de/HUI.pdf, http://www.ssei-online.de/cms/?q=en/node/36

Hmm, honestly I had not heard about HUI (Human User Interface! ;) ), so I’ve googled a bit. It seems very old protocol designed dedicated for Protools and even Mackie already abandoned such products… It’s quite minority protocol compared with MCU and hard to support it now, I think.

And according to the pdf above, HUI seems to use sysex for parameters (maybe I’m wrong though). At least I cannot understand it well and I think that the current duplex cannot handle sysex for each parameter.

Well, actually Renoise’s lua scripting can hundle sysex so supporting HUI is not impossible, but, you need to wait for the person who has lua programming skill and is interested in HUI.

To me, he appeal of using the HUI interface is that you can buy one for $200 USD on ebay. They went for 1000’s of $$$ a little more than a decade ago, are built like a Lamborghini and frankly I believe the design cannot be improved upon ergonomically or aesthetically. Why is our culture so obsessed with planned obsolescence? I use this and the wonderful Yamaha 02R, and have a 100,000$ state of the art studio from 1999 for 1% of the original cost. Many of my favorite top artists from my younger days made platinum albums with this gear!! That still works for me.