Kraken MIDI Connector

The Kraken MIDI Connector allows you to send UMP (Universal MIDI Protocol) messages, which are used for MIDI 2.0, from your mobile device to a computer (currently only macOS).

The reason why I created this is that there is currently no transport to send MIDI 2.0 messages from iOS or Android to a computer (or from the computer to your iOS or Android device). The USB connections for both iOS and Android are MIDI 1.0 only, and sending MIDI 2.0 via network or Bluetooth is not officially defined yet, so I created my own simple workaround for now.

The plan is to either include the official network or Bluetooth MIDI 2.0 transports once they are released, or simply remove the Kraken MIDI Connector again if it is no longer needed. But for now this is the only way to send MIDI 2.0 from your mobile device to any DAW running on your computer.

To be able to create a Kraken MIDI Connector module, you need to first enable MIDI 2.0 support in the general settings of MusiKraken. Then it should appear on your outputs list (including a Kraken MIDI Connector IN module in the inputs list, which is used to receive MIDI 2.0 events from your computer).

To use the Kraken MIDI Connector, you need to download it here and install it on your mac.

Once installed, you can start the connector app. In MusiKraken, open the settings of the Kraken MIDI Connector module and start scanning for the port on your computer (or type in the address and port directly in the text fields).

Then select a source and destination port in Kraken MIDI Connector, and now every MIDI 2.0 message sent to its network port will be passed to the selected destination MIDI port, and every MIDI message received from the selected source MIDI port will be passed back to the sender.

The Kraken MIDI Connector is very simple. It does nothing more than pass along the received MIDI 2.0 messages via UDP, so basically everyone can use it for other MIDI 2.0 purposes.

The app on your computer will publish a UDP service on the selected port on your computer, which can be searched for via Bonjour/mDNS (search for the Bonjour service with the name "_krakenmidi._udp"). Then send big-endian encoded UMP (Universal MIDI Protocol) messages to that UDP port.

There is currently no loss protection or anything additional features added, it just simply passes the messages on. All the MIDI 2.0 comunication needs to be done by the sender.

I will probably add Bluetooth support to this in the near future (as my local WiFi is quite unreliable), which will do the same: Simply pass the data on...

Once Windows releases their MIDI 2.0 support, I will also try to add support for it. But currently only macOS has MIDI 2.0 support.

Ports:

Every MIDI message sent to this port will be transmitted via UDP to the computer running the KrakenMidiConnector app, which will then pass it on to the selected MIDI ports.