Akai MPK mini plus driver

I just wanted to check first if someone is already working on or thinking about supporting the MPK mini plus. After seeing oscaracena’s great work for the mini mk3 I want it for the mini plus that I own. I can probably get this done relatively quickly (if I find the time between job and family :smiley: ) based on his code. Here’s hoping that Akai didn’t implement SysEx etc completely differently on those devices.

https://www.akaipro.com/mpk-mini-plus

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I have an MPK mini plus and was also thinking it would be great to add support for that based on oscaracena’s mini mk3 work. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make time to get over the initial learning curve and don’t expect to be able to do so any time soon. I should however be able to make time to help out with testing if you get there first.

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I’m actually struggling a bit to get started with reverse engineering the required SysEx messages. I assume it’s fairly similar to the other Akai devices already supported in Zynthian but I’m not sure how to get those messages or values (such as product ID) the easiest. MIDI-OX doesn’t seem to have anything to sniff those messages. I guess ideally I would use the Akai software to talk to it and then somehow sniff the messages since that is essentially doing the same thing as what we want to do from within Zynthian?

cc @oscaracena

Hi!

Does the MPK mini plus has some kind of utility to be configured? In that case, you just need to sniff the raw communication between your PC and the controller. I think this can be done with Wireshark or similar tools, but I’m not sure, as the RE was already done for the MPK mini.

I don’t have a mini plus, so I can not be of much help here :face_exhaling:

Thanks for the tip with wireshark, I didn’t realize it can capture USB. That’s perfect! I got the comms between the Akai app and the MPK and extracted the product ID from the SysEx so I should be able to make progress on this now.

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