[Rwp] Control Surfaces: I'm about ready to pull my hair out!

[Scott Chesworth]

Hey Chris,

There's a step in setting up control surfaces when using Reaper in
Windows that's not intuitive. I haven't read Oreo's instructions on
the Reaper Access site, but seeing as he's on Mac, he might not have
known that there's an extra bit of jiggery-pokery Windows users have
to perform.

In Preferences, navigate down the tree until you get to Control
Surfaces (it's second from last at the time of writing). If you were
adding a surface for the first time, you'd want to tab until you reach
the Add button. Seeing as you've already started setting yours up, you
could choose it from the first combo box and hit tab until you reach
the edit button. In this new window, you'll need to select your
surface protocol (which I'm betting you've already done). Then, here's
the part that's a bit tricky. Before you hit the ok button, you'll
need to use your screen readers virtual cursor, because there are two
important bits of configuration that need to be taken care of that
don't appear in the tab order. How these are presented changes
depending on which screen reader you're using, but if you poke around
in that window you'll find two controls which allow you to choose the
input and output ports of the surface you're adding. Seeing as we're
using virtual cursor, you'll need to choose your ports using whatever
the command to simulate a left click is with your screen reader. Once
you set both of those ports, hit ok, and you'll be back in the
Preferences window. One more ok out of that, and you should be good to
go.

Remember that if you get an error about Reaper not being able to
communicate with the surface or similar, the first thing to check in
your case will be that you've gone back into Preferences and disabled
the surface under MIDI Devices.

Hth, let us know how you get on.

Scott

On 2/16/16, Christopher-Mark Gilland <clgilland07 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually, neither is working, even when both done together, I'm not getting
> any error, or anything.  It just flat out won't work.
>
> Chris.
>