Use Bluetooth and MIDI devices
Control the Set list and the Songbook
The Setlist and Songbook have support for Bluetooth and MIDI devices which you can configure individually.
▫ Switch between the songs in the set list
▫ Scroll up or down, page up or down
▫ Start/stop the scrolling, metronome, drum machine, audio player, or the (YouTube) video player
▫ The Bluetooth and MIDI configuration with the set list
▫ MIDI support needs Android 6.0 Marshmallow or newer
How to configure a Bluetooth pedal
There is a video about ‘How to configure a Bluetooth pedal’:
How to configure a MIDI device
There is a video about ‘How to configure a MIDI device’:
MIDI settings
Before you can use your MIDI devices, you have to select them in the settings. You also have to map the MIDI messages to the actions in the Setlist and songbook. Please check your settings. They are valid for the Songbook and the Setlist. To use the MIDI integration, you need to have Android 6 or later on your device. Android supports MIDI over USB or Bluetooth.
Select a song with a MIDI command
The songbook allows you to switch the songs with a MIDI command from your MIDI device. To enable the song selection you have to do these two steps:
- Select the MIDI device in the settings (MIDI source).
- Insert the directive {x_sccrd_midiSongSelect:<number>} in each song you want to select by a MIDI device. The <number> has to be between 0 and 127 or 1 and 128. This depends on your device.
If your MIDI device sends the MIDI command SongSelect (0xF3), smartChord looks for the song with the x_sccrd_midiSongSelect directive and the song number. The song number is part of the command. If a song with this number is found, the songbook switches automatically to this song. If no song with the number is defined, nothing happens. If more than one song does have this number, the first found song with the number is selected.
Control a MIDI device
You can send MIDI commands from the Songbook to a MIDI device. For that, you have to:
- Define the ‘MIDI receiver’ in the section ‘MIDI’ of the settings
- Add special directives within the song.
The directive x_sccrd_midiOpen defines the MIDI commands which are sent to a MIDI receiver when the song is opened, the directive x_sccrd_midiClose when the song is closed. Both directives are not visible in the songbook.
The directive x_sccrd_midi defines also MIDI commands, but these directives are visible as grey ‘MIDI’ lines. They are automatically sent when the scroller scrolls the song and the line reaches the top or if you tap the line.
- {x_sccrd_midiOpen: <midiCommand1>, <midiCommand2>, …}
- {x_sccrd_midiClose: <midiCommand1>, <midiCommand2>, …}
- {x_sccrd_midi: <midiCommand1>, <midiCommand2>, …}
A directive can define multiple MIDI commands. The commands have to be separated by a comma. You can have multiple MIDI directives in a song. The commands are sent according to the order in the song.
A command is defined by one or more bytes, written in two-digit hexadecimal numbers. Normally hexadecimal numbers do start with ‘0x’. For more readability, it can be omitted.
Example with two : {x_sccrd_midiOpen: 90 30 6F, 91 3A 6F}
You can get a short introduction here:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~craig/articles/linuxmidi/misc/essenmidi.html and http://www.music-software-development.com/midi-tutorial.html
MIDI test
The smartChord tool ‘MIDI test’ can help you write MIDI commands, as it shows MIDI messages received from a MIDI device in the form you need for the MIDI directives. It allows you also to send messages to a MIDI device. This tool is available with version V7.17 or newer.