ProPresenter 7 is able to send and receive MIDI notes. We use general MIDI and do not currently support MIDI CC or MIDI Program/Patch Change.
Click the + and select MIDI. You will see the MIDI settings next.
If you are using MIDI hardware you may need to change the Hardware type. However, we have found that the majority of our users who send/receive MIDI in ProPresenter are use software controllers like Ableton or Playback by MultiTracks. These software controllers send MIDI over Ethernet (or wifi), which makes them much more convenient to use when the computer running tracks that is sending MIDI may be on stage and your ProPresenter computer is in a different part of the building.
Select Auto Reconnect so that ProPresenter automatically connects to your MIDI devices.
We will cover the basics of using the MIDI device first. At the end we will cover how to setup MIDI at the system level. As with all of our device protocols, a bit of pre-existing knowledge of how to use the device and protocol will be beneficial. Once MIDI is up and running, it tends to just work, but the initial setup process can be a bit tedious.
Sources and Destinations is where you select where you want to send and/or receive MIDI notes. Sources are incoming notes that will control ProPresenter. Destinations is where you want to send MIDI notes from ProPresenter to control something else. ProPresenter can send and receive MIDI simultaneously. When receiving MIDI, ProPresenter will listen on all channels. When sending, you can specific which channel you want to use. We'll explain how to create sources and destinations later.
You can find all of the MIDI channels by clicking on the MIDI Map button. The channels are based on the number you enter in the top left box. Enter your starting channel and click Auto Fill. You can use 0-99 for the starting range. MIDI has 128 notes (0-127) available. Starting at 99 puts the highest MIDI command at 127, which is the highest note available.
You will see that Messages is numbered out of the standard sequence. That is because it was added after the initial module was added to ProPresenter several years ago. Rather than shifting all existing values by 1 and messing up the programming for anyone already using MIDI, we simply added it with the next available note. Any future MIDI additions will be done the same way. You can manually override any of the note values rather than using Auto Fill.
Everything in the top section works by sending the specified note and any intensity from 1-127. The lower half of commands are used for selecting specific items, so the note is combined with the intensity to select that item. Here are a couple of examples to explain that:
You have 10 playlists. You want to select the 4th playlist and the 6th item in that playlist.
You would send Note 18, Intensity 4 to select the playlist and Note 19, Intensity 6 to select the item in the playlist. MIDI supports sequential commands, so if your program allows you to send more than one command at a time, ProPresenter will receive them in the programmed order.
You have 3 Props and you want to display the 2nd Prop.
You would send Note 25, Intensity 2. When you are ready to clear that Prop, you would send the same command.
If you have more than 127 items, you can't select those by index.
Once you have configured everything here, click anywhere to close the MIDI map and then click the Back button. Click Connect to enable the MIDI device.
If ProPresenter is only receiving MIDI notes from an external program, there is nothing else you need to do in ProPresenter. Create a few tests in your other program or your hardware controller and verify they are received by ProPresenter. If you send a note and it doesn't seem to be working, you can open the MIDI Map again and watch to see what note is being received. This will be shown in the upper right corner of the window.
As we have mentioned, you can also send MIDI notes to an external destination. This allows you to use ProPresenter to control anything that is connected to your network that can receive MIDI notes.
Right-click on any slide, select Add Action, select Communication, select MIDI, and select MIDI Note On. This will open the next pop-up shown below where you will actually select the note and velocity that you need to send. You can also send the note to a specific MIDI channel if necessary.
If your receiving device needs to receive an Off command, follow the same steps to add the MIDI Note Off Action to a slide.
You can edit or remote an existing MIDI Note action by right-clicking on a slide with a MIDI action and choosing Edit Actions or Remote Actions and selecting the MIDI Note action you need to change or remove.
It's also possible to send multiple MIDI notes from the same slide. Just repeat the steps above. You can also add multiple MIDI devices (Mac-only, currently) and give them each a unique name. When you do this, you will see an additional level in the menu system allowing you to specify which MIDI device you want to select for sending a note.
Now that you know how to use the MIDI device, let's take a look at actually setting it up outside of ProPresenter so that you can send and received MIDI.
If you are on a Mac, you will use the Audio MIDI Setup. If you are on Windows, you will need to install additional software to be able to use MIDI. rtpMIDI by Tobias Erichson (Free) or Bome MIDI Translator Pro (~$70USD) are the two most popular solutions. rtpMIDI is nearly identical to the MIDI controls of Audio MIDI Setup on Mac. If you are needing to control another program on the same Windows computer, Tobias Erichson has another program called loopMIDI that you can install.
We will look at the Mac setup first.
Launch Audio MIDI Setup using Spotlight. You will need to use MIDI Studio, shown below. Depending on whether you have ever opened Audio MIDI Setup before or not, you may see the Audio Devices window initially. Click on the Window menu and select Show MIDI Studio. You can close the Audio Devices window.
When you see this window, click on the globe icon in the toolbar. This will open the MIDI Network Setup window.
After you have MIDI Network Setup open, you will need to add a new session under My Sessions. Click the + button. The default session will be called Session 1. If you are running a MIDI session from another computer, it will show up under Directory. You will need to create a session and enable it first and then you can connect to the computer listed under Directory. Once connected, the session details on the right will be filled in. There is nothing else you need to configure. You can close Audio MIDI Setup now and finish configuring your other MIDI-enabled software or hardware.
You can also use MIDI to control another program on the same Mac. This is often done with a lighting program called Lightkey. You can send MIDI notes from ProPresenter to trigger lighting scene changes or other actions in Lightkey on the same Mac. You will not be creating a MIDI session for this. Instead, you will use the IAC Driver option that you saw on the first screenshot above.
Double-click on the IAC Driver icon. After the IAC Driver Properties window opens, click on Ports. Verify that you have Bus 1 or click the + to add a port. You can change the port name if you want it to be more recognizable. Check the Device is online box. You can close Audio MIDI Setup.
After you have configured the session or IAC Driver, you will see it appear in ProPresenter under Sources and Destinations. If you don't see the settings right away in the MIDI Device settings, restart ProPresenter.
If you are using Windows, you will need to open rtpMIDI to setup your session before you can using MIDI in ProPresenter. As you can see, this program is nearly identical to MIDI Network Setup on Mac. You will need to create and enable a session first and then you can connect to another computer in the directory. There are no other settings that you will need to configure. Since Bome MIDI Translator Pro is a paid application, we do not have setup instructions for using it.
You will need to install loopMIDI on Windows to control another program on the same computer. Open loopMIDI and click the + in the lower left corner. That's it! This program will continue to run in the background and launch at startup. You can right-click on the loopMIDI icon in the system track and uncheck the Autostart loopMIDI option to disable this.
After you enable rtpMIDI or loopMIDI, you can select the correct session information in ProPresenter. This interface is slightly different on Windows, but it works the same way as the Mac version.
