Control surfaces, and controller integration in general

[Michael Canavan]

So, I use and have used a lot of DAWs. DP is my favorite for writing on, for the most part.
The one black mark is MIDI controller and Control surface support. For whatever reasons DP is far behind all of them. Mackie and HUI support is great, glad to have it, but it's all there is, literally. Transports on Arturia, AKAI, NI, and other controllers, keys do not work. There's not a single Launchpad type device I know of that gets feedback , colors of pads for tracks and Clips etc. from DP.
Bitwig, Live, The one that gets censored here, and others have scripting languages that end users can use to customize control from the Likes of NI Komplete Control S series keyboards, hacking in support, or really giving more than NI do for it. I wouldn't even care if MOTU happened to make their own controllers, but they don't and it's the one area in DP that I find frustrating. IMO, anyway it would be freaking great if they partnered up with someone and got some real integration. Just fixing their MMC would be a good start.

[Michael Canavan]

Lol, popular rant I know. Looking at the Roli Seaboard Songmaker kit, it includes a transport that does MMC and MIDI CC, both of which DP can not work with to control it's transport.

Basically, all the most "modern" controllers use MIDI protocols that DP cannot use. This is a huge negative that I'm pretty surprised that MOTU didn't fix in DP10? They gave us modern Clip launching, and left the end user scratching their heads when trying to get an Arturia, AKAI, Native Instruments, Roli, etc. etc. transport to work with DP.

What shocks me about this is at one point DP did exactly what they should do now to remedy the situation, they were the first company beyond Emagic (Logic Pro), to use the Mackie Control surface, and the first to use the Mackie universal control surface support. For the most part it could be as simple as reverse engineering Logic or Ableton Live support in various control surfaces, I would imagine with the blessings and code access of the manufacturers.


Most DAWs have limited support for various controllers even not being in the big 4 that get universal support (Logic, Live, Cubase, Pro Tools), they at least get transport control. Anyway there are so many areas where DP crushes, Chunks are life, but control surface wise DP is in the dark ages, and that's got to hurt their image, when they don't work at all with controllers.

[Timeline]

I'm with you both!

[darrell]

Ditto here!

[Michael Canavan]

At the very least it would be fantastic if MOTU addressed the limitations DP has with MMC and how that plays out with all the more popular synth type controller keyboards. It really shouldn't be an impossible thing for them to address this, and without a doubt they've lost sales to people owning NI, AKAI, Arturia etc. controller keyboards with transport functions, since as it stands it simply does nothing, there's no way to set up DP to control transports than respond to MMC or CC messages, which are the common choices here.

All the companies I mentioned above use some combo of regular MIDI and proprietary for the faders and knobs and MMC for the transport controls... and they're super common. MOTU are playing a dice game that someone will buy M-Audio or Novation keys here in terms of controller keyboards.

Then there's the issue of Clips, and all the controllers out there set up to respond to clip launching in Bitwig and Live with various colored pads for the Clips in the project. I know some people are nonplussed about Clips, but as it stands it's like a big toe in the river, either dive in and offer some competition or don't. Clips in DP as it stands are "proof of concept" rather than anything I even consider over firing up Live.

[Ice.01]

Hi all, I’m new in DP10. How looks controller integration and MMC now in begining of year 2020 in actual DP10 version? What about support for Novation Launchpad and Ableton Push, or Push 2? Is it still that bad as is written above?

[Helen]

Hi all, I’m new in DP10. How looks controller integration and MMC now in begining of year 2020 in actual DP10 version? What about support for Novation Launchpad and Ableton Push, or Push 2? Is it still that bad as is written above?

Sadly, there has been no substantive change.