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Using a Midicontroller in Pixelmator Pro?

Using a Midicontroller in Pixelmator Pro?

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.

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tobias76

2020-10-25 15:31:16

I recently saw a friend working in Lightroom working with an audio Midi-Controller through a Plugin. So without scrolling and clicking all his way to eg color, brightness etc adjustments, he just grabbed the controller and it happened.

Is that anyhow possible in PP? Or, is there any real reason why that should never happen? 🤔 Looked incredibly useful to me, particularly for just quickly retouching photos.

Tried to research on PP specific and system-wide tools, but only find the standard Audio use cases... May the Apple Script support help here?

Thanks in advance for pointing me into the right direction,

T.
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Andrius Pixelmator Team

2020-10-27 14:02:38

Pixelmator Pro doesn't have built-in support for MIDI controllers, so yes, a custom AppleScript-powered plugin would be the only possible option. I haven't personally used a MIDI controller, so I can't guarantee this would work, however, it looks to me like you'd need to write scripts for each MIDI input to trigger a certain action in Pixelmator Pro. To detect those inputs and trigger the actions, you'd need a separate app. The MidiPipe app looks like it was designed for this purpose — though I haven't tried the app so I obviously can't endorse it, it's simply the first one I found.

There isn't really a reason why something like this couldn't potentially come to Pixelmator Pro other than it simply being a lower priority than other features/improvements. It isn't a huge priority because it's quite specialized and, looking more broadly, we feel right now it would be worthwhile for us to focus more on the adjustments themselves and potential features like a clarity adjustment, LUTs, adjustment layers, etc. For that reason, it's possible we may not get to a feature like MIDI controller support for years yet, if at all. There isn't really any way to know.

But if anyone wanted to try and whip something up using AppleScript, that would be cool and I'd do my best to help in any way I can (probably mostly by clarifying our AppleScript implementation).
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tobias76

2020-10-27 14:08:21

Hey Andrius,

thanks for the feedback & suggestions, will see if I can find some time to dig further into that!
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Kevin Dukes

2023-09-28 16:13:16

That would be an awesome feature.