uad2midi - Universal Audio UAD to MIDI trigger

A simple application that allows me to automatically select Sonarworks Reference 4 speaker profiles when I toggle studio monitors using my UAD interface.

Download latest version: https://github.com/versionstudio/uad2midi/raw/main/uad2midi-1.2-release.zip

What does this do?

UAD to MIDI (uad2midi) is a simple application that connects to your UAD interface and monitors any state changes, such as mutes, volumes or when you switch ALT monitoring. The application allows you to configure triggers on these events that can dispatch MIDI messages through any of your connected MIDI devices or send commands to the UAD console.

Why on earth would you ever need this?

I am running UAD interfaces in my studio together with two sets of studio monitors/speakers which are controlled by ALT monitoring on the hardware. I am also running Sonarworks Reference 4 (systemwide) for speaker calibration, where each monitor pair has a different calibration profile in Sonarworks. Sadly, Sonarworks Reference 4 cannot have multiple profiles loaded at once which means you need to manually select calibration profile each time you toggle between the studio monitors.

Happily, Sonarworks Reference 4 supports binding calibration profiles to MIDI messages, and that's where this application comes in. The default configuration coming with UAD 2 MIDI comes pre-configured for just this scenario, where toggling ALT monitoring on your UAD interface will trigger MIDI messages that you can bind to the Sonarworks Reference 4 calibration profiles of you choice.

Since UAD 2 MIDI is configurable, you can make use of it for other use cases as well that require UAD Console events to trigger MIDI messages.

Credit where credit's due

This application was made possible thanks to the reverse engineering done by Radu Varga, author of UA-Midi-Control. Thanks to the detailed explanation I got a good understanding of how to communicate with the UAD hardware.

How do I set this up?

The application has been developed and tested on Mac OSX, and requires no special permissions to run. The UA Mixer Engine process must be running for this to work. UA Mixer Engine starts up along with the UAD Console.

Requirements:

• Java Runtime (version 11 or later)
• Universal Audio UAD interface

Installation and running:

1. Unpack the application to a directory of your choide
2. Edit startup script bin/uad2midi.sh and set UAD2MIDI_HOME to the directory where you unpacked uad2midi
3. Edit configuration conf/uad2midi.properties. Generally, only MIDI device and triggers should need tweaking
4. Run the application through sh uad2midi.sh start. Stopping the application is done through sh uad2midi.sh stop
5. The application log uad2midi.logo can be found in the uad2midi home directory. For debugging or more detailed logging to find out what data your UAD Console makes available for use in triggers

Setting up a virtual MIDI device on Mac OSX

For my use case I used the virtual MIDI device IAC Driver for sending the MIDI messages. To do this:

• Search for the Audio MIDI Setup application in Spotlight
• In Audio MIDI Setup, click Window and then Show MIDI Studio
• Double-click IAC Driver
• Ensure that Device is online is clicked to make the device usable
• Click the Ports tab and make note of the name of the port.
• Open up uad2midi.properties and set the value of uad2midi.midi.deviceName to the name of the port

Some hints:

• UAD to MIDI won't start if the MIDI device cannot be initialized
• UAD to MIDI will automatically try to reconnect if connection to the UAD Console is lost
• If you want to control Sonarworks Reference 4 like I did, use NOTE_OFF as the MIDI command
• For auto-starting the application on login (Mac OSX), use Automator to run uad2midi.sh