Control Surfaces

A hardware control surface is device which typically has faders, knobs and buttons. It can be used to control MultitrackStudio's transport, mixer and effects.

Control surfaces connect to a MIDI port on the computer. The MIDI In device to be used for the control surface can be selected in the Studio menu's Devices window. The MIDI Out device should be specified as well if the control surface has LEDs or motorized faders.

The MIDI In device used by the control surface can be selected as a regular MIDI In device (for recording a MIDI keyboard) as well. In this case the control surface functions will have the highest priority, ie. only MIDI messages which aren't mapped to a control surface action will be recorded by MIDI tracks. This mechanism makes it possible to map some keys of a MIDI keyboard to control surface actions. You can, for instance, use a key to invoke the "Alternate Take" action.

The Studio menu's Control Surface option pops up the Control Surface Settings window. Here you can assign control surface knobs to specific functions using the Learn function. Ready to use presets for the TranzPort and AlphaTrack (Frontier Design Group), the BCF2000 (Behringer) and the UC33 (Evolution) are provided.

The Control Surface Bar, which can be made visible using the Studio menu's Preferences window, shows the names of the Mixer Sections that are mapped to the control surface channels.