8tlr-router

8tlr-router

Routes MIDI messages from Ableton Live to Reason

Getting started

MIDI setup

The idea of this project is to use eight tracks in the Ableton Live session view to control up to 64 devices in the Reason rack independently.

To make this work, you have to use the macOS app Audio MIDI Setup to configure five new IAC ports. One port is used to send MIDI messages from Live to 8tlr-router, four ports are used to send MIDI messages from 8tl-router to Reason.

Configuration file

After adding the ports using the MIDI Studio in the Audio MIDI Setup app, create a configuration file called 8tlr-router.config.yaml, either in your home directory, or whereever you are planning to run the 8tlr-router.

The config file should define your MIDI ports like so:

---
portName:
  input: IAC Live to Router
  output:
    - IAC Router to Reason 1
    - IAC Router to Reason 2
    - IAC Router to Reason 3
    - IAC Router to Reason 4

Installing the program

You should have an up-to-date version of Node.js installed. Then you can install 8tlr-router with npm:

npm install -g 8tlr-router@latest

You can confirm the installation worked by checking the version:

8tlr-router -V

Usage

Run the 8tlr-router by executing it on the command line:

8tlr-router

By default, the 8tlr-router does its job very quietly, i.e. it does not write a lot of output to the terminal it's running in.

If you want verbose output, run it with a DEBUG environment variable set, like so:

DEBUG=* 8tlr-router

This will log the processing of every incoming MIDI message.