CV-like patching and complex MIDI control

Hey!

I would like to create complex patches that offer a lot of control options on stage. Now I wonder about if certain things are possible, and how to do them.

MIDI control
It is nice to map individual knobs and buttons of external MIDI devices to certain functions and parameters. But, with control surfaces like Launchpad, Push, monome, … the fun starts when you are able to create shift actions and interaction between different elements of the device. This usually needs some kind of software, which is great, because it could run as a lv2-plugin on MOD.
Is there any way how I could use the MIDI-output from a plugin within the effect board to control parameters of other plugins on the same board?

CV control
This kind of control is obviously inspired by CV-patching on modular synths. Now, similar patching capabilities might be realised by misusing audio-in and -out ports, which is cpu-heavy and needs special builds with that feature implemented.
Is there any way to send messages at control rate, and to connect parameter controls of existing plugins to control-rate messages?

Any hints are welcome!

Cheers
Sebastian

JSYK some LV2 plugins already have CV ports, it’s built into the spec :smiley: but MOD will need to implement support for them.
I’d like to see both these features since I wrote an envelope follower plugin (not yet ported to mod). Perhaps inter-plugin midi control is already existing, IDK.

We already have CV working in the current codebase.
And there are already some LV2 CV plugins.

If you get the mod-plugin-builder, you can put them inside the MOD for testing.
ams-lv2 is a project that provides these kind of plugins.

One issue here is that MOD does not support ‘control outputs’ yet.
This is something we’ll investigate soon, but not quite right now.

NOICE! :smiley:

Cool. From your current perspective, would it be possible to connect control outputs to control inputs (aka parameter knobs like “gain”), or only to special control inlets? And do you have any hints about when this feature might see the light of day?

No pressure. But that feature really would make my day.

Control output connections will be possible when we implement virtual controllers.

Control chain is coming first, and we’ll likely need to rework some code to support it.
When that happens I’ll see if we can get the bases for virtual controllers already implemented too…

Right now the MIDI CC addressings and HW addressings use different formats and are also saved in different files.
We need to unify them, and control chain provides the perfect opportunity for some related rework.

seems like there’s currently no way to connect external devices to existing plugin control port inputs, right? …and i don’t see any plugins which have control port outputs.

am i missing something, or is the whole control port system still awaiting implementation?

in LV2 there are CV ports, and control ports. Control input ports become the knobs on your GUI. Control outputs show things like gain reduction in a compressor, or the pitch adjustment in the autotuner. CVs on the other hand are like the audio in/outputs where you connect port to port between plugins.

So that part is done. What isn’t done is allowing a control port of one plugin to connect to/control another plugin’s control port.

2 Likes

Have virtual controllers any to do with (for instance) the feature “modulate” in Reaper?
Would be great to assign a built in LFO as an actuator.