There are tons of great layouts shared by the community, but let’s face it: everyone’s setup and workflow is just different enough to keep things from working perfectly every time. While importing a layout is pretty easy, you’re likely to run into issues if you’ve made changes to the default midi settings in your software, apps or hardware synths. Things also get a bit complicated when you’re sending MIDI notes and messages on multiple channels to different programs or devices.

There are a couple of great features available in MIDI Designer Pro that make it easy to adapt layouts shared by other users to fit your own needs, or to repurpose your own layouts when needed.

Renumbering Controls and Changing Channels

This is the tool I’ve personally found most useful in making layouts my own. In design mode, you can tap on a page tab to open the Page Properties tab, and then click on the Controls icon at the bottom to display some useful control actions. The top button allows you to renumber controls and/or change the channel associated with that page. If you just need to assign a different MIDI channel, you can simply select the new channel number and tap the “Channel Only” button. If you need to reassign the CC numbers for the page’s controls, you can do that as well by choosing a starting number and clicking “Unused Only” to avoid numbers already assigned elsewhere in the layout, or “Sequential” if you want to ignore existing assignments.

Check out the section on Page-Wide Control Actions in the manual for more info.

Color-Coding

If you are using multi-page layouts, choosing different colors to visually separate controls into groups can be useful or even necessary. Of course, a layout’s original creator may have sprinkled colors throughout a page’s controls that don’t really suit you, so luckily there’s the option to remove custom colors, also found on the Controls view of the Page Properties tab.

It’s easy to quickly define the look and feel of the controls in your layout using the Page Properties Pane, with options for choosing the background color and texture, LED color, and highlight color for each page.

Combining Layouts

When you open a layout from an external program or from the Config -> Actions panel, you are given the option to append the new layout to the one currently loaded. This is a great way to combine multiple shared layouts, or to build onto an existing layout. Just be sure to save the combined layout once you’ve made the necessary tweaks so that it can be recalled for later use.