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After starting my second day of jerking around trying to integrate my new Arturua Keylab Essential 61 into my setup to control DP and still no dice, I think its about time MOTU came out with fully DP integrated keyboard controllers with buttons dedicated to the bells and whistles that make DP so great! Tons of buttons, transport controls, faders that can be assigned to any MIDI or audio tracks, etc. I'm tired of spending precuous hours trying to make other controllers do what they claim they do right out of the box.

My Keylab 88 MKIi works pretty well with the DP HUI and MCU drivers. I recall that I had problems when I hooked it up via MIDI, but the problems went away when I used USB.

digitiki wrote:After starting my second day of jerking around trying to integrate my new Arturua Keylab Essential 61 into my setup to control DP and still no dice, I think its about time MOTU came out with fully DP integrated keyboard controllers with buttons dedicated to the bells and whistles that make DP so great! Tons of buttons, transport controls, faders that can be assigned to any MIDI or audio tracks, etc. I'm tired of spending precuous hours trying to make other controllers do what they claim they do right out of the box.

Don’t hold your breath.

That said, Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S series keyboards work well with DP. I’d recommend Mk 2 or later. The Mk 2 are a steal these days and in Mixer mode you can bank through 8 tracks at a time across the built in screen(s) on the keyboard and have level meters, volume, pan… you can record enable tracks and you have basic transport control, etc.

Does KeyLab send sysex with its button presses? Or are the messages sent by the transport buttons editable? Does DP respond to SysEx to trigger commands, if that is what the KeyLab is sending?

Once you set it up, it should be good to go. I don't use that many remote controls, but DP seems quite capable of responding to keystrokes (QWERTY) and MIDI events.

The MIDI controller market seems pretty saturated by Korg, Arturia, Nektar, Roland, Yamaha, and other no-name products. You could certainly request that Arturia or even those users put together a profile to do part of that lifting.

I've got an Arturia Keylab 61 mkII and have its transport controls working with DP. DP Commands are the key... you may have to hold the Keylab button as you accept the message in Commands to get it working properly.

A couple caveats with DP and integration to controller keyboards, i.e. keyboards with transport controls and universal plugin integration. For any DAW it's best to stick with what is covered in their control surface list [copied in the quote below], and anything that supports Mackie or HUI control. There are a few products from various companies that list DP support, (Nektar LX + series comes to mind), then the rest are hit and miss at best.

The caveat that hasn't been mentioned yet is some DAWs can use control surfaces the way that NI KK keyboards, VIP, Automap back in the day worked, where you could universally map a plugins parameters or main parameters to your hardware, and every time you call it up the cuttoff, reverb, ADSR controls or whatever you set up are already mapped to those parameters. This is why I doubt MOTU put out any keyboard until this changes, and if it did, then you wouldn't need a specific keyboard to map parameters etc. Plus Magic Dave years ago said it's not in MOTUs hardware catalog to do keyboards and control surfaces. That said basic transport control, mixing control is available to the products listed below with any Mackie or HUI capable keyboard being able to do close to the same. [Novation, Nektar, Arturia etc.]

IMO James is dead on, the Komplete keyboards do some cool tricks with arming tracks in DP, like allowing any controller that is not the Komplete keyboard to stay armed when using it to select and arm tracks controlled by the Komplete keyboard, which is a perfect thing for it to do. Other DAWs and keyboard controllers can't do this. It means I can keep my drum plugin armed with a Launchpad, the MPE plugin armed with the Linnstrument, and the other 8 plugins can be instantly armed by selecting them with the Komplete keyboard.

Akai APC40mklI
Akai APC Key 25
Akai APC Mini
EuCon
HUI
Icon Control
Komplete Kontrol
Korg Keystage
Launchkey MK3
Launchpad Pro MK3
Launchpad X
Launchpad Mini mk3
Mackie Control
MCU Compatible
MCU Single Fader
Open Sound Control
Radikal SAC
SSL 360 Control