Lmms: Ability to control hardware synthesizers

[dj-pixus]

Although some software synthesizers are capable of very impressive things, there are cases when you can't avoid using some "metal". Being able to use hardware MIDI synthesizers is one of the many things that would make LMMS a much more professional program. There are many synths on the market that have no manual controls, only a black box with some ports, so MIDI is the only way of controlling them. Currently it is only possible to send note on/off and program change messages to an instrument, but it would be very nice if we could use hardware synths more or less the same way as the built-in ones.
There would be a new special track called "External synth" or something like that, in the row of Beat/Bassline, Sample track and Automation track buttons. This track could look the same as the existing instrument tracks, but without the volume and pan knobs. Maybe the blocks could be different color or something.
Clicking on a track could open a window, where the user could set up the MIDI device, channel and all this stuff, and on another tab you could create as many knobs as you want with each having a range of 0-127, and assign them to a MIDI CC number. This way you could directly control or automate the hardware synths.

What U think? :)

[xytk4]

Here's an idea... what if instead of having a special dedicated track for external MIDI control, a new "External Instrument" instrument plugin were to be added (similar to any of the LMMS internal synths), which had options for MIDI output device, MIDI channel, etc.
This sort of design (in my humble, non-designer opinion) is more user-friendly than having a whole separate type of track that does the same basic thing as any other synth (hold midi notes, play them back.)

And, to avoid the contradiction of having a knob that does nothing, perhaps the volume knob could be mapped to something useful like CC#7 (volume) or CC#11 (expression), or maybe to scale the velocity data sent to the device. (Or all of the above, switchable by a convenient setting in the plugin itself..) Pan could do a similar thing (CC#10).

In addition (and while I'm piling on features), a nice bonus that comes with this sort of implementation is that if at some point in the future LMMS gains support for recording audio (or audio input in general), the plugin could be extended to also take an audio return parameter, and then behave exactly like any other synth.

Thoughts?

[dj-pixus]

a new "External Instrument" instrument plugin were to be added

That's a reasonable solution too.
Also, if we use the Vol and Pan knobs as CC controllers, all the user-created knobs could have such a name according to the General MIDI specs. Some controls are labelled "Undefined" or "General Purpose", these could be just called the CC number. As the controls 32-63 have a special role of extending the resolution of other controls, there could be a setting if the user wants to use them that way.
Then there are some controls that should be toggle LEDs, especially from 120 up, as they usually control binary things.

[rah2501]

Just came here to say, after trying LMMS for the first time I was surprised this kind of functionality wasn't already present and that an issue had only just been raised 23 days ago. I have lots of hardware MIDI synthesizers that I would love to use with LMMS, it looks quite comprehensive and useful.

[dj-pixus]

This issue is not relevant anymore as we now have the CC Rack which does the job perfectly.
So I'm gonna just close this now.

[IanCaio]

@dj-pixus It's worth mentioning that currently the MIDI CC events are not forwarded through MIDI ports. There were discussions on how those events should be handled by LMMS and in the end the design choice currently used is that those events are handled exactly as if they were originated by hardware. Because of that, they are not currently forwarded by MIDI ports, but it has been brought up that we change that behavior in the future :grin: