How to insert a Note-Off before every Note-On message from Traktor to SmartPad?
I have a Midiplus SmartPad, and the LEDs are lit by sending a Note-On by MIDI and the Velocity determines the colour, there are 7, (Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, White, and 0 velocity is OFF. As the manual says, it needs a Note Off message between each Note On, otherwise the LEDs will get stuck. Unfortunately Traktor doesn’t send Note Off messages, and I need to find a way to intercept the Note On’s which Traktor send back to the SmartPad an insert a Note Off in front of it. Then I will be able to get Traktor to toggle to LED’s any number of times. I’ve managed to use the Modifier in Traktor’s Contorller Manager to set all the LED’s on to my choice but they can only be constant for the whole set.
I think the LoopBe1 virtual MIDI port would be useful here, but I really need an extra program which can do something like Cubase’s Logical Editor, or a Max4Live or Reaktor system where I can build the MIDI processing I need. I could write my own app in Lazarus/Pascal if I can find good MIDI libraries.
Perhaps someone here knows of the right tools to get this sorted? On Windows 10.
I got it sorted out! Using MIDI-OX and LoopBe1, LoopeBe1 just runs in the background, MIDI-OX has only the LoopeBe1 as input and the SmartPad as output, with one translation map on any NoteOn message which duplicates it and turns one of them into a NoteOff. Luckily it put them in the right order.
Now in Traktor controller mapping it uses SmartPad as Input and LoopBe1 as Output, and now I have my pads lighting up in any colour I want and number of times and now I have 4 of them flashing in series in 1/16, using the Beat Phase output. I’d like to find a way to make a Modifier increment to count the beats so I can have an led flash every 2 or 4 beats…so perhaps MIDI-OX has more to offer to do things which Traktor lacks?
It’s turning into quite a fun logic puzzle to solve.
First of all, thank you for this post! I bought this controller for a Traktor project, and not having LEDs is a real problem.
My problem now is LED mapping. I’m fairly comfortable with Traktor mapping.
I had already created a mapping for the smart controller, which I wanted to reuse, but I can’t seem to change the LEDs because some aren’t showing up in the correct color, even though I’ve configured it with the correct code in Traktor.
It was only possible with MIDI-OX and LoopBe1 running in the background before running Traktor.
Run LoopBe1 first to enable the virtual MIDI ports,
Then run MIDI-OX in which you need to add one entry in the MIDI translation to insert a NoteOff before every Note On going through it…and in the MIDI-OX settings you must point the inputs and outputs it takes the MIDI from LoopBe1 and out to the SmartPad.
In Traktor you set the mapping input to SmartPad and the output to LoopBe1.
SmartPad works in only one mode and so when turning it on you need to press the ‘Clip’ button.
I have stopped using the SmartPad mainly because the USB connection is loose, I am now using an Akai APCmini which is USB-C, and it displays more colours than the SmartPad, and has sliders, and doesn’t need the extra software.
You still have to set up the Outs in the mapping for each pad that you want to light up. The list of choices of what can be output is different to the list of inputs. For instance there are outputs for the Meters so you can make a column of pads light up with the audio level but I found it can only display the meter below 0db and the detail Traktor shows in the headroom space above that is not represented in LED outputs - a small bug there.
