The following is a set of articles explaining how to set up and use the MIDI communication protocol to send or receive commands with ProPresenter. They cover two portions of this setup: the system level setup, and the ProPresenter level setup.
This article is going to cover the ProPresenter Level Setup for both Mac and Windows Users. To jump to the System level setup, click below:
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.
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.