6foot5

For anyone puzzling over whether an Oxygen Pro will work with Cakewalk, or wondering how to set it up as a controller in Cakewalk, I want to share a few resources and tidbits that helped me out with mine (49-key). In short, it's a great keyboard/controller with extensive customization possibilities. I have it controlling transport and track volume/panning with no problem, and I've set up custom mappings for a bunch of buttons to do exactly what I want. Almost all controls are set up using Cakewalk's ACT plugin. I still don't fully understand what I've done, and am sure I've only scratched the surface. If you want to learn the M-Audio preset editor software (highly recommended for tuning any button/slider/rotary to your liking), M-Audio hides the manual for this on their website. Looking up Oxygen Pro won't reveal the preset editor manual. However, if you go to the following page and search for "Keyboard Controllers" > "Hammer 88 Pro", you'll see the Preset Editor manual in the results. As far as I can tell, it's the exact same editor offered to Oxygen Pro owners. https://m-audio.com/support/documents-search The below 13-min video was helpful to understand how the preset editor works at a high level. Also, the guy tells you how to find the software in the first place, which is not obvious (gotta enable advanced options in the M-Audio Software Manger, wtf): M-Audio Preset Editor overview (Youtube) On the Cakewalk side, this video has aged extremely well in terms of succinctly demonstrating how ACT controller setup works: ACT controller setup in Cakewalk/Sonar (Youtube) This part may be obvious to some/most, but Cakewalk does not process MIDI data unless you have a project open. I beat my head against a wall for a short time trying to MIDI-learn controls in the ACT plugin without a project open. Further, if you wanna map your 8 sliders and rotaries using ACT, you should have 8 or more tracks in your open project. Knowing that in advance would have saved me some time. Finally, the below forum post was so incredibly informative about the quirks of setting up an ACT controller in Cakewalk. There are some great details in there that don't seem to be well documented anywhere else. If you're feeling fuzzy about ACT, read this post in full. It's fantastic. http://forum.cakewalk.com/I-have-Axiom61-Should-I-get-a-new-to-use-ACT-m2168824.aspx#2174288 The Oxygen Pro has a couple modes - DAW and Preset. Each of these modes can serve as a completely separate controller in Cakewalk if you want to multiply your knobs and buttons (knowing of course that you'd have to switch between Oxygen modes to use them all). Out of caution, I used the M-Audio Preset Editor to make sure I wasn't repeating MIDI CC values between the two modes. I'm not sure if that's totally necessary, since the modes' commands are sent over different MIDI inputs. Just part of my ongoing learning! Also good to know, according to the Oxygen Pro manual and experience, DAW mode commands (both Mackie/HUI and CC) are sent over the MIDIIN3 input. Preset mode commands are sent over the "Oxygen Pro 49" input (the first one). So that may help with your controller setup if you want to use both DAW and Preset mode to control Cakewalk. For my setup, I decided to reserve DAW mode controls to Cakewalk only (not follow to plugins) and switch over to preset mode when I want to control plugins (and not Cakewalk). That division of labor seems to work OK. While I'm mostly using ACT to configure the Oxygen Pro, I'm also using Mackie Control for a few things, including the encoder knob that I couldn't quite figure out with MIDI/ACT. The bottom line is, with the M-Audio Preset Editor, you can define, per individual slider/rotary/button, whether you want its message to be sent as MIDI CC or Mackie/HUI. That's pretty awesome. Anyway, after struggling a bit with my own Oxygen Pro setup in Cakewalk, I wanted to share this info. I hope it helps someone in a similar situation!