Five screenshots from a Windows machine, start to finish. At the end the panel's four knobs and four buttons are a MIDI port in Live, mappable to anything with Ctrl-M, and Live can drive the panel back with clips.
Needs the Audio edition on the panel (v0.5.0 or later — the console's nav shows a MIDI tab) and the panel on the same Wi-Fi as the computer. macOS users: skip the driver, the same steps happen in Audio MIDI Setup → Window → Show MIDI Studio → Network.
Windows does not speak network MIDI on its own. Tobias Erichsen's rtpMIDI driver is free and does exactly this one thing: https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/rtpmidi.html. Install it, open it.
Under My Sessions, press +. A session named after your computer
appears. (The panel is already listed in Directory as patternflow —
that is Bonjour finding it. If it is not there yet, give it a few seconds,
or add it with the Directory's + using the panel's address and port
5004.)
Tick Enabled at the top of the Session box. Leave the port at 5004 and Who may connect to me at Anyone — that is what lets the panel call your computer by itself later.
Select patternflow in Directory and press Connect.
Patternflow moves into Participants with a latency of a few
milliseconds. Done on this side — you can close the window; the driver
keeps running.
Live → Settings → Link, Tempo & MIDI. Under Input Ports, on the row named after your computer (the rtpMIDI session), tick Remote — that is what lets the knobs be MIDI-mapped. Tick Track too if you want the buttons to play notes on a track. Under Output Ports, tick Track on the same row so clips can be sent to the panel.
Press Ctrl-M, click any knob or slider in Live, turn a knob on the panel, press Ctrl-M again. The panel sends an ordinary 0–127 knob value, so there is nothing for Live to guess about: it moves both ways at the same speed and stops at the ends.
Two things to know:
- How far a turn goes is set on the panel's console, MIDI page
(
http://patternflow.local/midi): one slider per knob from ×8 (a quarter turn end to end) through 1:1 to 1/16 (ten turns), moved together or one by one. It is remembered across reboots. - Takeover. After a knob hits an end and comes back, Live's Takeover Mode (same Settings page) decides how the parameter picks up — Value Scaling is the smooth choice.
On the MIDI page, press Use this computer. The panel remembers the address and opens the session itself every time it boots or the session drops, so rtpMIDI never needs opening again. (It waits 20 s first to give rtpMIDI's own reconnect a chance, which is why a fresh boot takes a moment.)
Put a MIDI track's MIDI To on the rtpMIDI port and anything on that track reaches the panel:
- CC 20–23 pin knobs 1–4 to an absolute value until a hand turns them.
The Pattern Lab's Director exports a show as exactly these four lanes
(director-midi.md) — drop that
.midon the track and the show plays on the panel from Live's transport. - Program Change picks the pattern by its index on
/patterns. - Notes 60–63 press buttons 1–4.
The full contract is midi-spec.md.
| Symptom | Cause |
|---|---|
patternflow missing from Directory |
Not the same Wi-Fi, or Bonjour blocked. Add it by address: the panel's IP is on its NETWORK screen and on the console's MIDI page, port 5004. |
| Connected in rtpMIDI, nothing moves in Live | Remote is not ticked on the input port (step 5). |
| Knob turns move the wrong parameter | Ctrl-M mappings are per set; check the mapping list on the left in map mode. |
| Every note arrives twice | Two sessions to the same panel — close one in rtpMIDI (only one is needed; the panel keeps at most two participants). |
| A knob barely moves the parameter, or jumps | The panel is on Relative steps mode on its MIDI page while Live guessed the encoder type wrong. Use Knob value with Live. |