MIDI Devices

7
MIDI devices
Ö If you create identical channels with the Channels set-
ting “Snapshot” and delete one of them and create a new
channel instead, this channel will be individual and without
the snapshot ability! For more information about the Snap-
shot options, see “Working with snapshots” on page 21.
The main edit windows
To edit device panels you use two main windows; the De-
vice and the Edit Panel window. In this section we will de-
scribe the main working areas of these edit windows and
what they are used for.
The Device window
1. Select a device in the Installed Devices list in the MIDI
Device Manager and click Open Device.
The Device window opens with a node structure in the left half of the
window. In this example, the top node represents the device and the
subnodes the MIDI channels used by the device.
2. Click on a node.
Now three areas appear to the right of the node structure: Device Node,
Panels and Variables.
The Device window
Device structure
On the left is a hierarchical view of the device’s structure,
which can consist of nodes, subnodes, and parameters.
By default, the structure of a newly created device (or a
device with no panels added yet) will either be based on
the MIDI channels that have been activated in the Create
New Device dialog (see “The Create New MIDI Device di-
alog” on page 6) or, as in this case, on one of the preset
devices, which all have the same structure (all 16 MIDI
channels activated).
In the Device structure, you can easily move parameters
between nodes by clicking and dragging them to the other
node. This is very handy if you want to restructure your pa-
rameters for the panel assignments.
You can also delete empty nodes and parameters by se-
lecting them and pressing [Delete] or [Backspace].
Device node
This shows the name of the selected node. You can rename
some or all nodes, for example if the device is a typical GM-
compatible synth you may want to rename “Channel 10” to
“Drums”.
Panels
In the Panels window area a list of panels assigned to the
selected node will be shown (currently no panels are as-
signed).
• The “Add Panel” button opens the Add Panel dialog,
see “The Add Panel Dialog” on page 8.
• When an existing panel is selected in the Panels win-
dow area, the “Edit Panel” button will open the panel for
editing in the Edit Panel window, see “The Edit Panel win-
dow” on page 9.
Variables
• The “Add Variables” button lets you define variables.
Variables are useful when you’re working with multiple in-
stances of the same panel. A typical example is when you
have a multi-timbral synthesizer with 16 parts, where each
part is identical in terms of features and functions, and all
that distinguishes them are the MIDI channel numbers. So
you create multiple subnodes where the variable is named
“part” and the variable range is 1–16. This way you can
repeat the same objects and parameters across all parts.
!
Once you set the attributes (identical/individual chan-
nels, snapshots) here, changes can only be applied
with major effort like direct editing in XML, see “Edit-
ing the device setup XML files directly” on page 34.
However, there is a little workaround for channel set-
tings, see below.