Melbourne Exchange is a new free community library where owners of Melbourne Instruments’ Roto-Control — a motorized MIDI controller whose knobs physically move to match the parameter they are mapped to — can share their setups and the software they have built for it.
It opens with more than 60 entries.
Melbourne Instruments’ own video manual for the controller.
What is in it at launch
Plugins: Universal Audio’s 1176 and LA-2A collections and the Distressor; SSL plugins; Brainworx, Maag and Analog Obsession; Logic Pro’s own Compressor.
Hardware pedals: Chase Bliss, Boss, Meris, Hologram, Old Blood Noise and Moog.
Hardware synths: Elektron, Moog, Waldorf and Korg.
Each setup is a file that imports into Melbourne Instruments’ ROTO-SETUP app, with parameter names, colours and detents already in place.
The verification statement is the detail worth copying
This is what separates this from the usual pile of shared presets, and it is a small design decision with large consequences.
Every entry has its own page, credited to the person who made it, with a download count and a clear statement of what it has been checked against: the maker’s documentation, a Roto-Control, or the device itself. Owners can also confirm that a setup works with their own gear.
Three tiers of verification, stated per entry. That matters because a controller mapping can be wrong in a way that is invisible until it isn’t. A mapping built from a manual may have the right CC numbers and the wrong ranges, the wrong curve, or a parameter that the manual lists and the firmware does not implement. A mapping tested against the physical device is a different claim entirely.
Nearly every shared-preset repository in music software conflates these and presents everything as equally reliable, which means the whole collection is worth about as much as its worst entry. Saying “checked against documentation” out loud costs nothing and makes the good entries usable.
Everything hosted on the Exchange is shared under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) — a real licence, named, rather than a vague gesture at sharing.
The APIs are published, which is the actual story
Until now, Melbourne Instruments added support for new platforms themselves, via free updates — more DAWs, Max for Live compatibility. The Exchange changes who can do that.
Both of Roto-Control’s APIs are published in full:
- a serial API for configuration
- a SysEx API for live two-way control
And the source for Melbourne Instruments’ own Ableton Live, Bitwig and Logic Pro integrations is on GitHub.
Two-way is the phrase to notice. The knobs are motorized, which makes the controller an output device as well as an input one — it can be told where to move. A published API for that is what allows someone to write software that drives the hardware’s physical state, not just read it. The site lists third-party work already doing this: RotoSeq, a Max for Live sequencer by Alut in which the eight knobs reshape the clock itself, and MAP8, an extended Ableton Live script by Quixotic7.
Publishing your own integrations’ source alongside the spec is the part that tells you the openness is meant seriously. A specification tells you what the bytes are; a working integration shows you what a good implementation looks like, and removes the guesswork that makes most “open API” claims hollow in practice.
Jonathan, VP of Marketing at Melbourne Instruments:
“We’re delighted, and honestly a little amazed, by what owners are doing with Roto-Control. People are mapping gear we never expected and building software for it we hadn’t imagined. The Exchange gives all of that a home, with the maker’s name on it. And because the APIs are published, anyone can build on it, whether they write the code themselves or with an AI assistant.”
The AI starter prompt
One more detail, and it is a first as far as this site has seen in music hardware: the Exchange includes a starter prompt for AI coding assistants such as Claude, Cursor and Copilot that points the assistant at both specifications before it writes any code.
That is a sensible and slightly novel piece of documentation design. The failure mode when someone asks a model to write code against a hardware API is that the model writes something plausible from whatever it absorbed about similar devices, and the result almost works. Pointing the assistant at the authoritative specs first is the cheapest available fix, and shipping that prompt as part of the docs means every user starts from the same grounded context rather than inventing their own.
The Exchange also carries a guide to building a mapping — how to map a device in ROTO-SETUP, how to get the feel right with detents and step labels, and how to export a file you can send to anyone.
How to contribute
Upload your setup. It gets its own page with your name on it. Given that the list currently has no coverage for, say, u-he or Spectrasonics Omnisphere, there is a lot of obvious ground for anyone who owns the hardware and the plugins.