X/Y Surround Panner: MIDI Assignment?

[TheRain]

Hello- please forgive me if this is a really basic question. I'm trying to help someone use a MIDI Controller I designed with the Surround Panner in Complete Production Toolkit. The person I'm trying to help is in another state and I do not have this software, and cannot find any resources on the web to tell me how this might be achieved.

Basically, I just need some instructions for how to assign MIDI CC's to an X/Y surround panner control. Can anyone help with describing how this is done (if it can be done)?

The rest of what I need to tell this person is just basic usage of the controller I created.

Any help would extremely appreciated~

collin

[Postman]

This would have to be on a separate MIDI port that PT would see as a surround panner peripheral. Try channel 15 (may not matter). Controller 2 is L-R, Controller 3 is F-R. "Bumps" to position (+1, -1) can be sent on controllers 16-20 (CV 1 and CV 127), I think. That should get him started, it is what I see when looking at my -new- panner's midi stream. I haven't done it from scratch so I may not have the whole story. Might fall under the "reverse engineering" category that we've promised not to do so please don't tell Avid where you got the information.

[TheRain]

Postman- thanks very much for that information. I can see that much of this is designed in a proprietary fashion.

I was wondering though, isn't there an X/Y surround panner plugin with this software? That's really what I want to control with MIDI, controlling many different channels at once using different CC's might not be possible for my controller, so I was hoping the X/Y plugin would map 5.1 surround around an X/Y setup, and my controller could just control X/Y position?

Any thoughts on that?

Again, i really appreciate the information you gave, it sounds like it was not so straight forward to obtain.

[Postman]

Pro Tools' surround panner is not a modular plugin, it is a basic building block of the audio mixer engine. Control of the panner gains are not user-assignable to MIDI controllers and the protocol is not a public document as far as I can tell.

There are a couple of hardware panner interfaces. In order to use a supported MIDI panner, it must be assigned as a MIDI peripheral through a dedicated port on Pro Tools' MIDI interface. The non-public protocol establishes the MIDI channels and controller numbers that are used. The hardware panner is then "pointed" to a particular panpot on a particular channel by manual methods (or navigation buttons on the panner hardware...watching the screen to see what you are doing). You cannot use the hardware to control more than one panpot at a time no matter if it is mono, stereo, or surround. PT allows one and only one MIDI panner to be assigned during setup. This is handled in the peripheral setup menu, not through a MIDI track.

Unless you mimic a Pro Tools Surround Panner option, assigned as a MIDI peripheral, you cannot control panning via MIDI. You may be able to fool PT into thinking a MIDI panner is connected by using the information I posted earlier, but since I have not actually tried it I cannot make any promises.

The only way I can see how to pan more than one channel at a time is to do it all through volume faders and special routing setups. It would be a user nightmare.