Frontier Alpha Track:
The Sound of One Fader Sliding

Apr 20, 2007 5:19 PM, Advertorial by David Battino

           
 

Map Your Own

The AlphaTrack also has four buttons labeled F1 to F4. In Pro Tools, they’re assigned to Zoom In, Zoom Out, Enable Scrub, and Undo. Pressing Shift changes those functions to Preroll, Post-roll, Audition, and Redo. In Digital Performer, though, you can assign the F buttons to almost any key command by using DP’s Setup/Commands window. The DP and AlphaTrack PDF on Frontier’s download page explains how.

But what about the programs that aren’t yet supported? Because the AlphaTrack has a Mackie HUI mode, you can make it work with Apple Logic, albeit with a few compromises. For details, see the post in Frontier’s online forum at http://www.frontierdesign.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=713.

As mentioned, I was also able to use Ableton Live’s MIDI Learn function to map a number of AlphaTrack controls to useful parameters. That technique should work with other programs that support MIDI Learn as well.

To add some AlphaTrack goodness to programs that don’t support MIDI control, I had to get sneaky. The AlphaTrack MIDI implementation is on the bundled CD-ROM and also is available online, but one still has to get the application to respond to the commands. First I downloaded a free utility called midiStroke (http://www.charlie-roberts.com/midiStroke), which maps incoming note and Control Change events to Macintosh keystrokes. (For Windows, try Bome’s MIDI Translator; http://www.bome.com/midi/translator.) Refer to the included Native MIDI Mode document, or operate controls on the AlphaTrack and use SNoize MIDI Monitor to see what data they sent out.

Mapping the AlphaTrack Play button (Note Number 94) to the Macintosh spacebar gave me instant transport control over iTunes and BIAS Peak, neither of which supports MIDI control. In Pan mode, I discovered that AlphaTrack Knob 3 sends out a burst of CC 18 messages with a value of 1 when turned clockwise and a value of 65 when turned counterclockwise. It was then simple to map those to Volume Up and Down (Command-Up Arrow and Command–Down Arrow) in iTunes. Figure 2 and Table 1 show some of the mappings I set up for Peak.

FIG. 2: By running the AlphaTrack’s MIDI output through midiStroke, a free MIDI-to-keystroke utility, I made the F1 through F4 buttons call up plug-in windows in BIAS Peak, which doesn’t support MIDI control. Here, F1, which outputs Note Number 54, is mapped to Command-Option-1 on the Mac, which opens Peak plug-in window 1.

Sample AlphaTrack Native-mode mappings for BIAS Peak

Following the classic laptop-musician joke, my final trick was programming the AlphaTrack to check my e-mail. First I wrote an AppleScript that made my e-mail program connect to the server and download mail. Then I assigned the script to the key sequence Control-Shift-U, using a macro program. Finally, I programmed midiStroke to fire that sequence when I pressed the AlphaTrack’s F4 button. You’ve got MIDI!