Question

I am thinking of developing a controller script for Bitwig to support the ATOM in MIDI mode. The MIDI mapping section of the manual is pretty good, but I cannot find out whether and (more importantly) how I can set the color and intensity of the pads by sending MIDI to the ATOM from Bitwig.

Thanks for your help and consideration,

Edoardo

Answer 1

I tried sending the CC value that the Atom sends to DAW in MIDI mode when toggling a button (e.g., Play) back at the Atom (with value 0 for off or 127 for on)... but the state/light of the button does not change! It would be nice to have full specs of how to update state of ATOM by sending MIDI messages to it (including button lights and pad lights).

Answer 2

I'm developing a script controller for Ableton LIVE to support the Atom pad. After a bit of reverse engineering seems to me that in MIDI mode inputs are disabled and you can not turn on pad lights. In order to use the native mode in any other DAW you just need to send the secret hand shake, which is a C-2 note off 127 velocity to the channel 16 (midi tuple (143,0,127)) to the ATOM pad. I still do not have a complete MIDI output chart and I'm working on it, in order to see the MIDI output messages just use a  MIDI sniffer such as MIDI monitor.

Always free the hardware from software slavery.

Cheers,

Simone

Answer 3

I have reverse engineered the ATOM MIDI maps there: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BeAaOXkV6T_ngA90_TCr_-dRszv2qGH4j0daPlNFH7s/edit?usp=sharing

I’m also working on a small Python script to tinker with it at https://github.com/ematech/AtomCtrl where most of the protocol is described including changing pad colors.