meh

(Almost) Free MIDI Controller

Well it’s about time that I posted something.

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me for help. He wanted to create something that will allow him to control all sorts of effects in Fruity Loops, like many available midi controller products. He was, however, looking for the cheapest solution, and suggested using an old keyboard as a controller.

As I was toying with MIDI and my Arduino at the time, and started messing around in Fruity Loops, I was able to come up with a quick and easy solution. I used code from the s2midi application, that I had known from my Arduino prototyping and another Code Project example about keyboard hooks in C#.

After around 10 hours of development I came up with a small application that catches all keyboard input using hooks (and does not pass them to other applications, to prevent collision with existing hotkeys), and generates MIDI control commands. MIDI Yoke was used to bridge my application’s output and FL’s input.

The application works by “emulating” knobs, with assigned keys to increment, decrement, maximize or minimze their values. It is also possible to choose different step sizes for inc/dec. Currently the knobs are “hardcoded” as they are needed for my friend’s modified keyboard controller:

He connected the keyboard via USB, alongside a normal keyboard, and is going to use the two to control Fruity Loops in real-time.

Here’s a screenshot of my app:

Although it may be a bit funny to post about this application without releasing the code and executable, I’d rather not do it at the moment, as it requires a bit more work. I did not aim for high code quality anyway, as it is one of my first C# applications.

I think this will turn out to a simple program that one could use to control music software better than a mouse, but still no match for a true hardware MIDI controller (which is one of the projects in my TODO list )