[LCtalk] wireless Midiremotecontrol by an LCX

[Michael Lohrengel]

Hallo Fokko,

meanwhile I spent some more time to find a convenient way to use my PDA as
a wireless Midi remote controll.

I use cuelists in which a write to midi cuestep is always followed by a
hold for ever cuestep. Your suggestion to use a cuelist for every command
would eat up too many cuelist, after all, the LCX still does the lightwork
at the same time. It would however be a lot smarter if a write to midi
command could have an hold for ever option right away - maybe a suggestion
for an upcoming firmware update?

At this point I only use midi prg. Change commands and I can do a lot with
it: Try various EQ settings in my 01V 96 mixer from different positions in
the room while doing a mixdown, start, stop and change midifiles from where
ever I want, change sounds in any expander, operate Logic from the
vocalbooth when doing recordings without having to stumble across
midicables - it's great.

The only thing that should and could be drastically improved is the macro
page in the PDA.

The "Load macros from row x" line at the bottom is a pain in the ass.
Instead there should be instant access to other macro pages by either
having e.g. 16 little buttons representing macro pages 1 - 15 and a "go to
macros 16 - 32 button or, may be better, a horizontal scrollbar that would
scroll through all available macro pages. It would be convinient too if you
could distuingish macros for different purpuses by different background
colours of the according macro page. E.g. red background = PAR lights, blue
background = moving head macros, yellow background = midicommands to change
mixersettings, purple = start particular videos from a midishowcontroll DVD
Player and so on.

And heres come my please, please Part: We need one page that can be
operated idiotproof, fast and without a stylus in a dark stage situation
even from people like my who dont have the best eyesight. I suppose you
have seen the skype softphone page with the number buttons? I dream of
something close to that, I call it simply numberpage.

Top Row: a big name field with no more than 8 possibel letters, showing the
name of a selected macro.

Second row from the Top: nothing but a big three digit display

And underneath, taking up the whole other space:
Ten big numberd buttons 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0

Let me explain: you want to call macro 56

You type in e.g. 056 by taping 0,5,6 one after the other. The big three
digit display will than say: 056 so you know, you tapped right and the name
field will say the macro name, e.g. Mixer056 (or: CEO-talk or 1act-2sc) and
by than tapping this namefield, the macro will be executed. To stay in the
midiworld, you should be able to choose any of 127 macros without ever
changing a page on your PDA.

The way to setup this number page is like that: first, you organize all
your macros in the macro pages the way it is now, so you have e.g. ten
pages with 16 macros each = 160 macros. And than you go to the numberpage
and map each of the 127 possible numbers to a specific macro: say
001 is mapped to macro1, page 1
002 is mapped to macro2, page 1
017 is mapped to macro1, page 2
104 is mapped to macro 9, page 12 ( just as an example)

this way, you can easily build a typical 127 Prg midi controll box.

I say it again: I dream of something like that - and you are almost there,
almost everything is already done and working. Could we have the rest too?

Regards, Michael Lohrengel, Berlin