MIDI controller + midi2lr + rtpMIDI over wifi and remote desktop

[Kerry Wang]

Hi all,

I just got a Behringer X-touch Mini and started playing around with it yesterday.  After hours of tinkering, I wanted to share my success story of using the X-touch Mini over remote desktop.  The process is pretty easy and may seem trivial, but I have no MIDI/musical production or digital communications background, and I couldn't find any discussion of how to set this up in forums and Youtube, so this is for those of us who are new to using MIDI instruments.  

I use a Windows laptop as my main machine for life/school/work and have a more powerful, separate Windows desktop which I use for photoediting (primarily Lightroom and Photoshop).  Because I live in a small apartment, I have only a small desk for my laptop with an external monitor.  Thus my usual workflow photoediting is to use my laptop to remote-desktop login to my photoediting desktop (I use the software AnyDesk).  This is the basic toolchain of what I was aiming for: 

X-touch Mini (USB) --> laptop --> LAN via rtpMIDI --> photoediting desktop --> midi2lr

To use the X-touch Mini at my laptop, I use the rtpMIDI software to connect MIDI devices over network.  The software and basic setup tutorial is found here.  To my understanding, those using Mac have the rtpMIDI driver built into OS X.

After following steps to the rtpMIDI tutorial, I found that my X-touch Mini's signals were still not making it to my photoediting desktop's midi2lr.  I believe it was because my laptop considers the X-touch Mini as an MIDI input, and there is nothing connecting that to rtpMIDI's output to broadcast over the network.  So, I found a piece of software that has the "MIDI thru" feature, which takes a MIDI input and rebroadcasts it as MIDI output.  The software I stumbled upon was MidiLayers, which is available here.

In MidiLayers, go to Tools > MIDI setup > MIDI Interfaces tab and set X-TOUCH MINI as an "IN" and the virtual MIDI instrument that rtpMIDI creates (defaults to the name of your computer) as an "OUT" and then click OK.  On MidiLayers' left-hand panel, I set it to "THRU In1 to Out1 Out2".

And that's about it.  With these settings, I am able to use the X-touch Mini from my laptop to control Lightroom on my desktop!  Hopefully this helps someone out there.  I anticipate I will not be able to use this over Internet without additional port-forwarding steps for my router.  It's not a huge priority now, but I will post an update if I get that to work.

Thanks to everyone who made midi2lr a thing!

[Kerry Wang]

Looks like midi2lr is unable to send the slider data back to the X-touch Mini, so everytime I change photos, I need to scroll past the new photo's slider positions using pickup mode.  Can anyone shed some light on how that slider data gets back to the MIDI controller?  If I turn on traffic the other way (enabling the virtual MIDI as an "IN" and X-TOUCH MINI as an "OUT") I get an endless loop of gradually shifting sliders. 

[Rory Jaffe]

MIDI2LR sends data back to all MIDI receivers it detects when it starts up (or after a "rescan devices"). So all get the same data. MIDI2LR assumes that you use different channel/control# combinations for each of the control surfaces (for CC or Note On messages) and different channels for pitch wheel messages. It also assumes that the channel/control# used for sending data to MIDI2LR is the same combination expected for feedback on the current value.