I’ve been happily tinkering with my Raspberry Pi5 ‘software only’ Zynthian… thanks again for all the help with getting it going.
I’ve been looking at the Wiki and other documentation, but I can’t find an answer to my next question… I have, amongst my assortment of cheapo instruments, an M-VAVE MIDI controller:
Is there some way I can set it up so that four of this device’s rotary controllers map to the functions of the four rotary controllers on a ‘proper’ hardward Zynthian? Thanks!
The lack of an equivalent of the encoder switch for short bold and long presses renders an attempt to do this as rather unwieldy. Tried it with a nord modular 2 and the results were rather unusable.
@wyleu I have had some success in mapping buttons on my Axiom to act as CUIA buttons with short, bold, long action.
I check that Note On 48 is mapped to Arrow Down, then I add a MIDI rule to convert my button press CC96 to Note On 48.
MAP CH#15 CC#96 => CH#15 NON#48
@riderless_horse what does the encoder output? Is it MIDI CC? What messages come out when you rotate in each direction? Is it endless encoders?
If it’s anything like my M-Vave controller the knobs are completely programmable and are endless encoders.
The implementation. has become rather more complete than my attempts so things might well have in proved. I tried this at least a couple of years ago.
Hi @riderless_horse !
If you really want a MIDI controller is fully integrated for managing the zynthian UI, you should develop a “Controller Device Driver” (ctrldev driver).
Alternatelly, you could use CUIAs by MIDI MASTER CHANNEL, but this always will be sub-optimal.
All the best,
BTW, this model also looks very interesting as minimal device for zynthian-UI control:
And it’s cheaper 
Regards,
Funny, I found these mvawe products just a couple of days ago on Ali
I think the one you have pointed should be an old version as it doesn’t appear on their product page
This one is in their catalog and has more feature for the same price:
with 8 encoders, midi over BT, USB, and serial midi through 3.5mm jack, it can run on batteries.
[edit] it looks like there’s a built in arpeggiator, and device configuration is done from an external computer via a softare downloadable on their website. Win and MacOs version are available.
Review here:
[/edit]
All these control surface do not have rotary encoders with the switch function (at least, the ones I know), so there will be always a workaround to find for short/bold/long push.
They’re endless encoders, yes. I don’t know exactly what messages it passes when I turn them, is there a way I can find that out? I know that when I rotate them, the little ‘m’ appears in the top right of the Zynthian’s screen. Another thing I noticed is that if you load up a drum synth with the M-VAVE and my Arturia keyboard both plugged in, Zynthian makes it active on the former’s pads rather than the keyboard, so it’s definitely being recognised in some way.
Yep, that’s the one I have… priced against Akai etc. equivalents it is ridiculously cheap, so I decided to take a chance on it!
I don’t really need a solution for everything that the ‘clever’ knobs on the Zynthan hardware do, I don’t mind using the mouse for some things; mostly I would just like to be able to use the knobs on the M-VAVE to alter the parameters on the various synths, as I find using a mouse in that way really fiddly. Would that be a difficult thing to achieve? I have started reading a document on Controller Device Drivers as referenced earlier in this thread, but there looks to be a steep learning curve (for me at least!) there.
You could just treat them as normal MIDI CC Generators and MIDI Learn them to the chain as a snapshot.
It depends if you actually want zynth control as well.
Use the webconf midi log facility.
It’s a great tool for learning about MIDI…
I believe these use the same configuration software as the M-Vave SMK-25II that I have so the controls should be fully programmable.
If you monitor the midi connection while configuring it you should see the sysex that gets sent for each option.
