Hey all,

I'm experimenting with some various Midi controllers on my Debian system, and I wanted to know if there's a way to view all the different controls and their output? For example, if I had a keyboard connected via USB and the system recognized it, I'd want to see a listing of all the triggers, sliders and knobs it had, plus the values they currently were outputting. Is this possible? Thanks.

-TechFalcon

not as far as I'm aware

first, midi is event-based, there's no standard way to query hardware for its current settings, you have to turn the knob to get it to output some data

you need to read the MIDI datasheet of the hardware to find out what controller numbers it sends, or, "midi learn" - sniff the data as you turn each knob to see what controllers are sent - eg with "aseqdump" from a terminal.

USB HID is much more complex than MIDI (not surprising, since MIDI is ancient), and does allow you to see what controls are available (eg "this is a joystick with 2 xy analogue joysticks and 6 on/off buttons")

When I got my MIDI keyboard, I just used [ctlin] to figure out the numbering for all the knobs. If you're getting MIDI input into Pd, you can read the middle output from [ctlin] and then test each knob to see what controller number it outputs. And then you can use that number as an argument if you want a [ctlin] object to read only one controller. Basically just set up all the MIDI objects ([midiin], [bendin], [touchin], [pgmin], etc.) and mess around on the keyboard and see which ones output numbers.