Start and stop transport from MIDI keyboard controller

[Starship Krupa]

I have a very simple 2 octave MIDI controller that happens to have some rudimentary controls.

3 MIDI messages it is capable of sending are Start, Stop, and Continue.

Is there a way to control Sonar's transport with these buttons? Ideally, I'd like Start to act as the Play button, Stop the stop button, and Continue the pause toggle (or possibly some other command).

[Promidi]

11 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I have a very simple 2 octave MIDI controller that happens to have some rudimentary controls.

3 MIDI messages it is capable of sending are Start, Stop, and Continue.

Is there a way to control Sonar's transport with these buttons? Ideally, I'd like Start to act as the Play button, Stop the stop button, and Continue the pause toggle (or possibly some other command).

Depends on how programmable these buttons are on your MIDI controller in term of what MIDI events you can program them to send.

Configured as a standard MIDI controller and not a control surface or an ACT controller, I can do this with the Edirol PCR-800

This is how I do it here.  

[Starship Krupa]

Its buttons are not programmable at all. It has two that send program changes and then three that send Start, Continue, and Stop.

Full disclosure: it's one of those Rock Band keytar controllers. I spotted it at Salvation Army at $6 and noticed that it had a 5-pin DIN connector to go with its two octave full size keyboard. A bit of research revealed that in addition to being a wireless Rock Band controller, these things are also full-fledged velocity sensitive MIDI controllers.

You can shift the octaves on it, handy for playing bass parts, and it has a pitch bend ribbon controller. My guess is that there were people on the design team for it that lobbied hard for it to double as a real MIDI controller and got their wish. Kudos to them.

It has one potentially challenging quirk in that it expects to see the diode drop from the original MIDI spec's optocoupler. So if your MIDI interface doesn't have that, the keytar won't realize that it's plugged into a MIDI interface. Easy enough for me to solve by soldering an LED across the line in my MIDI interface, but a potential stumbling block in some scenarios.

I recently fired up MIDI-OX to find out whether any of the buttons was sending MIDI, and that's when I saw that it was sending these MMC commands.

According to the Cakewalk documentation, it looks like Cakewalk is supposed to respond to those when something else in the MIDI chain is set up as the master clock.

Despite my doubts about the stability of whatever clock my Rock Band keytar could supply, I tried it and Cakewalk just wouldn't respond.

As you say, @Promidi, Sonar can be set up to respond to MIDI note events easily, but I want to use those transport controls. As much as I see MIDI as one of the musical equipment industry's great triumph, and love what I can do with it, it sure has its quirks.

If I could find some utility that can translate MMC commands to note events, that would do it.