Plogue Bidule, HID extractor and thrift USB devices

Plogue Bidule is a way to plug together MIDI and audio software things. It is very flexible, you can get very complex with it, I have not really gotten complex with it, but then I haven't had to.

One really great thing it can do is to extract HID data from USB input thingies like joysticks and keypads. Set it up to extract the data and send notes, and a simple USB 16 key numpad becomes a MIDI controller, with just a little bit of bidulery to get it to work.

In the HID extractor bidule, you select 'keyboard'. What this does is cause all the keys on the keyboard to produce MIDI pitches/notes, including those on the USB keypad. Then, you set up a Note Filter to filter out all notes except the ones on the USB keypad. Then, you set up your app in MIDI learn mode (ctrl+m for Live) and select the functions you want to map to the buttons that make most sense to you. Note that the NumLock will produce a continuous note value if you don't filter that out.

So now my nifty little keypad does - to go to previous scene, + to go to next scene, <- to xfade left, "5" to xfade center, -> to xfade right, / to stop clips, * to start them, and 1,2,3 arm audio tracks 1,2,3.. and the others I haven't mapped yet.