I love Reaper to death, but I swear, it’s the little edge case things with Reaper that really piss you off.
My latest, I think it is actually impossible to make the knobs on my MIDI controller learnable.
For the Arturia KeyLabs, there’s two MIDI inputs; one is the normal keys and modulations like pitch bend and mod; the other is via a control surface interface, using Mackie Universal. This covers all the DAW control, transport controls, faders, and knobs.
Plug it in and click the DAW preset, everything works perfectly. Faders control the track and master volumes, knobs control track pan, the cursor control works, etc.
The problem comes when I want to remap the knobs. I want to map them to be learnable by plugins to control parameters.
This works fine for the normal MIDI control messages but the control surface stuff is not detected by MIDI Learn. At all.
So I looked in to mapping them to Actions. And it looks like the Actions are also limited to MIDI CC and OSC for this, no Mackie Control or HUI.
I think it’s literally a “can’t get there from here” right now.
Meanwhile I fire up Live and they map with one click. So frustrating.