Mackie Control Universal Pro User Manual
- Mackie Control Pro
- Mackie Control Universal Firmware
- Mackie Control Universal Driver
- Mackie Control Universal Pro Manual
Mackie Mackie Control Universal Pro Manuals & User Guides. User Manuals, Guides and Specifications for your Mackie Mackie Control Universal Pro Music Mixer. Database contains 1 Mackie Mackie Control Universal Pro Manuals (available for free online viewing or downloading in PDF): Quick start manual.
YOUR MIX
AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
Modern DAW software has given us virtually unlimited possibilities for manipulating audio, but sacrifices the organic feel of faders and knobs at our fingertips. Reclaim that experience without losing the power of software with the expandable MCU Pro control surface. With simple USB plug-and-play setup with nearly any DAW, you will be mixing like a pro with real motorized touch-sensitive faders, buttons and assignable V-pots in no time.
Features
View online Quick start manual for Mackie Mackie Control Universal Pro Music Mixer or simply click Download button to examine the Mackie Mackie Control Universal Pro guidelines offline on your desktop or laptop computer. The Mackie Control Universal Pro gives you smooth fader control with the responsive feel of some very expensive analog boards from years past. The faders are touch sensitive 100mm, and they are motorized. There is a full meter display that will show you the parameters and track names. There are some. View & download of more than 1130 Mackie PDF user manuals, service manuals, operating guides. Music mixer user manuals, operating guides & specifications.
Mackie Control Pro
The Ultimate Control for Your DAW
- Mackie Control Universal Mackie Control Extender. Cool Edit Pro). Logic Control (use with Emagic Logic). HUI (use with Digidesign Pro Tools). When you first turn on Mackie Control Universal. CONTROL EXTENDER USER SWITCH IN MIDI CONTROL SERIAL NUMBER RISK OF ELECTRIC SHOCK.
- Sep 27, 2011 I originally purchased the MCU Pro, because Mackie claims that it's the 'universal' control surface that will work with any DAW. Now with the messed up display, fader mis-calibrations, basically everything I mentioned above, I might be returning the unit and going a different route.
- Read user reviews for Mackie Control Universal Pro 8-Channel Master Controller with USB and see over 325,000 product reviews at zZounds.com.
Did you purchase an MCU Pro or MCU XT Pro on or after September 12, 2019? Get your Free Avid® software here
RESPONSIVE
Visual Feedback
We equipped the Mackie Control Universal Pro with a generous two-line, 55-character backlit LCD to display parameters like track name, channel metering, I/O assignments, plug-ins, EQ, dynamics or anything our various software partners want you to see.
TACTILE
Channels, Faders and Banks
Equipped with nine 100mm motorized touch-sensitive faders from Alps® —one for each channel, plus a master fader and support for an unlimited number of banks. Each fader channel also has a V-Pot, surrounded by an LED collar to indicate the current value, and dedicated buttons for record ready, solo, mute, channel select, and signal present LED.
PLAYS NICE
Software Friendly
While MCU Pro is compatible with all major music production software, it is also designed to specifically work with your application —just access your software’s parameters in the master section and you can get right down to action. We even supply pre-labeled Lexan overlays for popular applications.
PRO
Expandability
The MCU XT Pro is an eight-channel control surface extension for MCU Pro. The XT Pro has all the channel strip features of the MCU Pro —without the master section. Depending on your music production software support, multiple Extender units can be used together with a MCU Pro to emulate a large-scale control surface.
Applications
NO more point and click
With MCU Pro, you get deep, intuitive control of mix and plug-in parameters, real-time visual feedback and set up is plug-and-play —without any MIDI mapping whatsoever! Streamline mixing in your project studio or scale up with multiple MCU XTs to mix major projects. With the push of a button, writing automation on dozens of tracks in a large music project or even mixing for film and television is now effortless.
Manuals
Owners Manual
Download nuwave pic manual and cookbook. Quick Start Guide
SPECS
SOFTWARE/FIRMWARE
Driver
Driver Install Instruction
SUPPORT DOCS
FAQ
PRODUCT PHOTOS
MCU Pro
MCU Pro
MCU XT Pro
Suggestions
With MCU Pro, you are fully tactile. Why not get tactical and comeplete your Mackie studio?
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Recording
The Nucleus, from Solid State Logic, is a 16 fader Mackie Control device that includes many buttons, separate meters, two LCD displays and other features. The device is not cheap (around US$5000 at the time of writing), and has some design features (or lack thereof) which some Ardour developers find questionable. Nevertheless, it is a very flexible device, and makes a nice 16 fader surface without the need to somehow attach an extender to your main surface.
Pre-configuring the Nucleus
Your Nucleus comes complete with a number of 'profiles' for a few well-known DAWs. At the time of writing it does not include one for Ardour (or related products such as Harrison Mixbus).
We have prepared a profile in which as many buttons as possible send Mackie Control messages, which makes the device maximally useful with Ardour (and Mixbus). You can download the profile and load it to your Nucleus using the Edit Profiles button in SSL's Nucleus Remote application. Be sure to select it for the active DAW layer in order to make Ardour work as well as possible. Note: unfortunately, the Nucleus Remote application only runs on OS X or Windows, so Linux users will need access to another system to load the profile. We will provide notes on the profile settings at a future time.
Connecting the Nucleus
Unlike most Mackie Control devices, the Nucleus uses an ethernet connection to send and receive the MIDI messages that make up the Mackie Control protocol. Specifically, it uses a technology called 'ipMIDI' which essentially 'broadcasts' MIDI messages on a local area network, so that any connected devices (computers, control surfaces, tablets etc.) can participate.
All other DAWs so far that support the Nucleus have chosen to do so by using a 3rd party MIDI driver called 'ipMIDI', which creates a number of 'virtual' MIDI ports on your computer. You, the user, tells the DAW which ports to connect to, and ipMIDI takes care of the rest.
Ardour has builtin ipMIDI support, with no need of any 3rd party packages, and no need to identify the 'ports' to connect to in order to communicate with the Nucleus. This makes setting it up a bit easier than most other systems.
Unless … you already installed the ipMIDI driver in order to use some other DAW with your Nucleus. If ipMIDI is configured to create any 'ports', it is not possible for Ardour's own ipMIDI support to function. We decided to offer both methods of communicating with your Nucleus. If you regularly use other DAWs, and appreciate having ipMIDI permanently set up to communication with the Nucleus—that's OK, you can tell Ardour to use the ipMIDI driver you already have. But if you're not using other DAWs with the Nucleus (and thus have not installed the ipMIDI driver), then you can ignore the ipMIDI driver entirely, and let Ardour connect directly with no configuration.
Connecting via Ardour's own ipMIDI support
This is usable only on computers with no 3rd party ipMIDI driver software installed and configured. If you have the OS X or Windows ipMIDI driver from nerds.de, it MUST be configured to offer ZERO ports before using this method.
Open Preferences > Control Surfaces. Ensure that the Mackie protocol is enabled, then double-click on it to open the Mackie Control setup dialog.
Ensure that the device selected is 'SSL Nucleus'. The dialog should show a single numerical selector control below it, defining the ipMIDI port number to use (it should almost always be left at the default value of 21928).
Communication is automatically established with the Nucleus and you need do nothing more.
If this does not work, then make sure your network cables are properly connected, and that you are not running other ipMIDI software on the computer.
Mackie Control Universal Firmware
Connecting via 3rd party ipMIDI support
This is usable only on computers with 3rd party ipMIDI driver software installed and configured for (at least) 2 ports.
Open Preferences > Control Surfaces. Ensure that the Mackie protocol is enabled, then double-click on it to open the Mackie Control setup dialog.
Ensure that the device selected is 'SSL Nucleus (via platform MIDI)'. The dialog should show four combo/dropdown selectors, labelled (respectively):
Main Surface receives viaMain Surface sends via1st extender receives via1st extender sends via
You should choose 'ipMIDI port 1', 'ipMIDI port 1', 'ipMIDI port 2' and 'ipMIDI port 2' for each of the 4 combo/dropdown selectors. Kodak easyshare z712 is user manual.
Communication should be automatically established with the Nucleus.
If this does not work, then make sure your network cables are properly connected, and that you are running the appropriate ipMIDI driver and have configured it for 2 (or more) ports.
Nucleus Design Discussion
You might be reading this part of the manual seeking some guidance on whether the Nucleus would make a suitable control surface for your workflows. We don't want to try to answer that question definitively, since the real answer depends on the very specific details of your workflow and situation, but we would like to point out a number of design features of the Nucleus that might change your opinion.
Cons
Mackie Control Universal Driver
| No Master Faster | It is not possible to control the level of the Master bus or Monitor section. Really don't know what SSL was thinking here. |
|---|---|
| No dedicated rec-enable buttons | You have to press the 'Rec' button and convert the per-strip 'Select' buttons into rec-enables |
| No dedicated automation buttons | You have to press the 'Auto' button and convert the first 4 vpots into 4 automation-related buttons, losing your current view of the session. |
| No buttons with Mackie-defined 'Marker' functionality | Mackie's design intentions for the interoperation of the Marker, rewind and ffwd buttons requires profile editing in order to function properly. |
| No 'Dyn' button | This is hard to assign in an edited profile. To be fair, other Mackie Control devices also lack this button. |
Pros
| Single cable connectivity | No need for multiple MIDI cables to get 16 faders |
|---|---|
| Broadcast connectivity | Connecting to multiple computers does not require recabling |
| 16 faders from a single box | No need to figure out how to keep extenders together |
| Meters separated from displays | Contrast with the Mackie Control Universal Pro, where meters interfere with the display |
| DAW profiles | Easy to flip profiles for use by different DAWs. |
Ambiguous
Mackie Control Universal Pro Manual
| Ability to make buttons generate USB keyboard events | The extent to which this is useful reflects the target DAWs inability to manage all of its functionality via Mackie Control |
|---|---|
| Sophisticated 'profile' editing | It is nice to be able to reassign the functionality of most buttons, but this is only necessary because of the relatively few global buttons on the surface. |
| Builtin analog signal path | SSL clearly expects users to route audio back from their computer via the Nucleus' own 2 channel output path, and maybe even use the input path as well. They take up a significant amount of surface space with the controls for this signal path, space that could have been used for a master fader or more Mackie Control buttons. The USB audio device requires a proprietary driver, so Linux users can't use this, and OS X/Windows users will have to install a device driver (very odd for a USB audio device these days). The analog path also no doubt adds notable cost to the Nucleus. There's nothing wrong with this feature for users that don't already have a working analog/digital signal path for their computers. But who is going to spend $5000 on a Nucleus that doesn't have this already? |