What is this?

There is a problem when trying to control Native Instruments Traktor 2 / Traktor 3 with Behringer BCD2000. It happens that the MIDI messages that the BCD2000 sends to the computer, are not suitable for configuring Traktor 3. This results in that you can controll Traktor 3 with your BCD2000, but you lost a lot of funcionalities. For example, you will never have BCD2000 LEDs working, or could use the jog wheels for scratching / pitch Bending.

In Sep 2003, a thread was created in Native Instruments forum speaking about this problem.
When this is being writted, this thread has more than 1000 replys. It seems that there is a lot of people who wish to control Traktor 3 with, the BCD2000, but neither Native Intruments nor Behringer have provided a solution to this.

The only real working solution that I've found so far is based on a project released under GPL license by a guy called Cycokraut: MIDI Rules.

• This is just a "rule set" used by MIDI rules.

What is it not?

• It's not a new driver for the BCD2000.
• It's not a patch that you apply to Traktor to change its behaviour .

How does it work?

MIDI Rules is a Java application that works as domain specific languaje for transforming MIDI messages: in MIDI Rules tou write "rules" that catch a MIDI message, transform it in another message, and send it through a MIDI interface.
We use this program to make the transformations of the original BCD2000 MIDI messages into another messages that Traktor3 can use.

Basically it works this way:

• You send MIDI messages from your BCD2000 to the computer.
• This MIDI messages are received by MIDI Rules. According to our needs and a secuential state, we transform the received message into the messages we need, and we send the new MIDI messages through MIDI Yoke (that acts as a MIDI interface between MIDI Rules and Traktor) to Traktor.
• Traktor interpretes the received messages.

Note that using MIDI Rules we achieve three different goals:

• We can make the jog wheels work, since we can transform the received messages into proper messages or sequences of messages.
  
• Since MIDI Rules has state, whe can send to Traktor different messges in function of another actions previously done. With this we can map more features. For example: we if we just push the jog wheel, it makes pitch bending. If we do it after the scratch button was activated, it scratches.
  
• We can send MIDI messages to the BCD2000 telling to switch ON/OFF the LEDs, so we can have the BCD2000 LEDs working.
  

Previously released MIDI Rules sets

Cycokraut and some other guys called Quadrispro and mb4guns have allready released some MIDI Rules sets that work fine. One of these sets is even able to control Traktor 3 in four decks mode. All of these sets are for using Traktor WITHOUT an external mixer. This means that you use the BCD2000 either to do the functions that you do with the turntables, as well to the functions that you do with your mixer.

Since I like mixing with an external, real mixer, I've worked in this MIDI Rules set.

It only implements the functions as playing, pausing, cueing, looping etc. But you have to do the mix in a real mixer. Good thing is that I've used the remaing buttons and knobs in the BCD2000 to other functions, as adding FX in each channel and a lot of features.