Use a MIDI device to control your Mac

Neither direction needs a game controller attached. A MIDI keyboard, pad grid, or knob box drives macOS on its own with nothing else plugged in, and the outbound side can be fired by any input InputConfig reads, including your Mac's own keyboard and trackpad.

You have MIDI gear and want it to run your Mac

Notes, pads, knobs, sliders, pedals, the pitch wheel, aftertouch, and Program Change all become bindable inputs. A pad can send Command and C, a knob can scroll a page, and a sustain pedal can hold the left mouse button down so you can drag with your foot. Start at A MIDI device as your Mac's input.

You want to play a DAW from something other than a keyboard

Any control InputConfig reads can send MIDI to a music app through a virtual port the app creates for itself. Notes with velocity, control changes, pitch bend, Program Change, and transport commands all leave that port. Start at Sending MIDI out to a DAW.

Both directions can run at once. A knob on your MIDI keyboard can send a keyboard shortcut into macOS while a controller button plays a note into your DAW. InputConfig deliberately never connects to its own output port, so the two cannot loop back into each other.

Connect the device over USB or Bluetooth MIDI. InputConfig finds it on its own, with no setup and no drivers. Open a preset, add a binding, set its input type to MIDI, then press Scan and play a key, twist a knob, or move the pitch wheel. The control you touched is captured into the row.

From there the binding behaves like any other. It can send a key, a mouse click, mouse motion, scroll, a typed phrase, a macro, a Siri Shortcut, or a system function. The full catalogue is on the bindings page.

Polyphonic key pressure, which is the per note version of aftertouch, is not read, and neither is system exclusive. If your keyboard sends poly pressure, bind channel aftertouch instead.

Every CC binding carries a knob mode, picked from the channel menu on its row. The setting only applies to Control Change; notes, pitch bend, aftertouch, and Program Change ignore it. Pick the one that matches the physical control you are turning.

Turn Step

Turn mode has one setting of its own, Turn Step, in the same menu. It sets how much rotation counts as one nudge, so a knob that feels twitchy can be slowed down and a knob that feels sluggish can be sped up.

Three things people build with these

• Scrolling that follows the knob. Bind the CC in Dial mode, plus direction, to a Mouse Wheel output, then add a second binding on the same CC in the minus direction for the other way. Return the knob to centre and the scrolling stops.
• A hardware volume knob. Bind the CC in Turn mode, plus direction, to Volume Up, and a second Turn binding in the minus direction to Volume Down. System functions fire once per press, which is exactly one nudge, so every few steps of rotation moves the volume one notch.
• Arrow keys on a dial. The same Turn recipe pointed at the Right Arrow and Left Arrow keys steps through a photo library, a slide deck, or a list of flashcards.

Any channel and any device is what most people want. It means a preset keeps working when you unplug one keyboard and plug in another, and it means a preset you share with someone else works on their gear without editing.

Pin a binding to a specific channel when one device sends on several at once. The common case is splitting a keyboard: set the lower octaves to a channel of their own and bind those to Mac shortcuts, while the rest of the keyboard stays on its usual channel and keeps playing your music software untouched. Channels are numbered 1 to 16 the way they are printed on hardware.

Pin a binding to a device when you have two pieces of MIDI gear connected and want each one doing its own job. The device menu lists everything InputConfig currently sees by name, which doubles as the fastest way to confirm your keyboard was detected at all. If the list says no MIDI devices are detected, the problem is the connection, not the binding.

Set a CC binding's output to System Volume (follows input) and the Mac's output level tracks the control's position one to one. Knob at the bottom is silence, knob at the top is full, and every position in between lands where you would expect. There is no press threshold involved, so the whole sweep of the control is live, not just the half above the midpoint.

It works from more than a knob. The pitch wheel, aftertouch, and a game controller's analog triggers all feed it, because all of them report a position rather than a press.

You do not need an IAC bus, a loopback utility, or any extra setup. The port exists because the app is open. Its identity is saved the first time it is created and reused after that, so a DAW that has been told to listen to InputConfig still finds it after a restart.

What a binding can send

All six are starting points rather than finished setups. Duplicate one, open it, and change the CC numbers, notes, and channels to match your own gear. How the library, the folders, and the Smart Preset Maker fit together is covered on the presets page.

The layout is built to answer the question you actually have, which is whether the message you think you are sending is the message arriving. It shows a seven octave keyboard with octave labels, shaded by velocity as you play and dotted on the notes a binding is watching. Every knob you have bound gets a dial of its own, and so does any knob the hardware sends that no binding is watching yet, up to sixteen of them. Each dial is labelled with the control's real name, so CC 74 reads as Cutoff rather than as a number, and a bound dial carries a badge naming what it is doing: Switch, Dial, Turn, or Fader when it is driving the system volume. Pitch bend and aftertouch get meters of their own, sitting beside a strip of all sixteen channels that lights the ones with traffic on them.

Under that is a rolling event log listing the last messages that came in with their values and velocities, which is the fastest way to find out that a knob you thought was on CC 71 is really on CC 72. The panel renders at rest before anything is connected, so you can lay a preset out before the gear arrives, and clicking any key or dial opens the binding behind it with a jump straight to that row in the editor.

The visualizer draws one panel per device slot, so a MIDI instrument and a game controller can sit in the same window at the same time, each with the layout that suits it.