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Live Sharing MIDI button presses

Started by Turnaround, May 24, 2026, 09:37:54 AM

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Turnaround

I am looking for a way to use Live Sharing to allow a midi button press on one iPad to activate the same midi button on another Ipad.  The scenario is that I have defined a paired MIDI preset that sends MIDI signals via bluetooth to my mixer to disable/enable the effects on the mixer.  On my iPad I have this MIDI preset pair pinned to all songs - the idea being that I can enable/disable delay and reverb on the mixer when the singer wants to address the audience between songs. Additionally I have a bluetooth pedal that will trigger those actions.

I want to enable the singer to also trigger the preset pair.  The mixer will not accept two bluetooth connections simultaneously, so I would like the MIDI button on the singer's iPad to activate the same button on my ipad which is bluetooth connected to the mixer.  If the singer taps the FX Mute MIDI button in BH, it would activate the same button tap on my iPad which would send the signal to the mixer.  But also, if I were to activate the MIDI mute button on my iPad, it should set the mixer and be reflected on the singer's ipad.

The closest I have come to this ideal scenario is to provide the singer with a bluetooth pedal that triggers the MIDI preset at her iPad and having my Ipad follow the Remote Control messages from her iPad.  But when I activate the preset from my iPad or from my bluetooth pedal it is not reflected on on the MIDI button on her iPad.

We both need to be able to disable/enable effects on the mixer and have a visual indication of the state of the MIDI button on both iPads - i.e. she presses the MIDI button and the same button on my iPad appears as pressed and vice versa.  I hope that's clear.

arlo

"The closest I have come to this ideal scenario is to provide the singer with a bluetooth pedal that triggers the MIDI preset at her iPad and having my Ipad follow the Remote Control messages from her iPad."

You could do the same thing in the opposite direction, so both tablets are following each other's remote control actions.

In that case, you would always need to select that MIDI button from an app control action, not from the button on the screen.

Also, then whenever one of you sends the MIDI message to mute the effects, the other device will also send the same message. That shouldn't cause a problem if you have separate "on" and "off" messages rather than a single toggle message.

Turnaround

Unfortunately I am using the toggle function and as a consequence it is too easy for everything to get out of sync. 

But I take it from your response that Live Sharing does not include button presses, right?

Since we have a chatty singer, I am implementing an action to mute all effects when I make a song selection.  So two things happen when I make a song selection - an automation track is triggered and it sends a song-specific MIDI preset to the mixer, and also on song selection the effects are muted.  Chatty singer can tell a joke or whatever and I just have to remember to un-mute the effects before we start playing the song.  This is probably better than giving the singer a pedal which she will forget to use.  So effects errors are on me and me alone.