MIDI Feedback and REAPER Integration Questions

General discussion
1

What an amazing controller — and an equally brilliant concept.

Huge thanks to everyone involved in creating Electra One, and continued thanks to those who keep improving it by writing software and tools that adapt it to synthesizers, DAWs, and beyond.

In this thread, I’d like to focus on integration of Electra One with REAPER: I’ll describe the challenges I’ve encountered, and hopefully we can discuss possible solutions. I’m not a professional developer (yet), but I’m slowly learning — and I’m really looking forward to the MIDI & Lua Crash Course.

MIDI Feedback Issue

I started by using Knob Connector, which is well integrated with REAPER and definitely improves workflow. However, I wanted to go further and create a custom preset to control a single plugin or even a chain of plugins. The web editor is excellent for this — intuitive and flexible. But I quickly ran into a serious limitation: Electra One does not receive current values from the FX parameters . There’s no MIDI feedback from REAPER back to the controller. This makes custom plugin control one-sided — and it’s frustrating when a single accidental touch can overwrite a carefully tuned parameter.

Is there any known solution to this? Any planned improvement for proper two-way communication with plugin parameters?

OSC Support

Is OSC support planned — or even technically possible? I remember having some success using OSC with other controllers and VSTs for proper feedback and synchronization.

Shift Button Functionality

Is it possible to configure the hardware buttons on the Electra One case as modifiers?

For example:

  • Normal state: control EQ frequency
  • While holding Shift: control EQ Q (bandwidth)

Or perhaps configure them for fine adjustment , stepped values , or context-sensitive functions ?

Thank you again for such an inspiring piece of gear. I’d love to hear thoughts or advice from the community and developers alike.

Best regards,

Sergey Elt

2

This is not possible ATM. I’ve requested that we can script this behaviour (for similar reasons as you) but the current E1 OS won’t allow that.

For this to work, you’ll need a MIDI-OSC Bridge, running on the machine your E1 is connected to. I haven’t used any, I just know that they exist and that people use them for that.

OSC relies on network and UDP. That’s a very different technology than MIDI. I only know of a very few controllers that support OSC (e.g. the Asparion D700 has a MIDI-OSC bridge) but haven’t seen one that directly builds OSC into the device with Ethernet port and so on.

For controlling a single plugin, KnobConnector covers a lot of use cases. Is there something specific that doesn’t work well with the plugin you want to use?

Controlling multiple plugins at the same time is not yet supported by KnobConnector but you can quickly remap to any FX on the current track by using this action.

There is no universally accepted communication standard for transmitting text info and other information about a control. With MIDI 2.0, this will change but it’s not ready, yet.

So for now, your best bet is a custom control surface plugin.

1 Like