What If You Could Use Vibe Coding to Customize Your MIDI Hardware?
The CME H12MIDI Pro puts powerful MIDI connectivity and customization in your hands. But what if the next step was creating your own MIDI features using AI?
Meet the H12MIDI Pro
The CME H12MIDI Pro is designed to be the central hub of your MIDI setup. With six USB host ports, six pairs of TRS MIDI inputs and outputs, and USB-C connectivity to your computer or mobile device, it brings your MIDI gear together in one powerful standalone device.
Using the free HxMIDI Tools software, you can customize MIDI routing, filtering, merging, splitting, and mapping to build a setup that works exactly the way you want.
No complicated workarounds. Just flexible MIDI control.
What If You Could Go One Step Further?
We're entering the era of vibe coding, where people can use AI to create software by simply describing what they want.
Now imagine applying that idea to MIDI hardware.
What if you could tell an AI assistant:
- "Create a custom MIDI function that switches between my synth setups"
- "Build a MIDI processor that transforms incoming messages into something completely different"
- "Make a custom controller function for my live performance"
And what if you could share your creations with other musicians, or download features created by the community?
Your MIDI hardware could become more than a device with predefined features. It could become a platform for creativity.
How Open Should MIDI Hardware Be?
Of course, there's an important question.
Should manufacturers allow users to customize parts of their firmware, or should certain functions remain protected to guarantee stability and reliable performance?
Perhaps the future lies somewhere in between: a stable hardware foundation with a flexible layer for community-created features.
We Want Your Ideas!
Using the H12MIDI Pro as an example, we'd love to hear what you think.
If you could create your own MIDI features using simple AI prompts, what would you build?
Would you want complete freedom to modify firmware? Or would you prefer a protected system that allows custom functions without compromising reliability?
Join the conversation, share your ideas and concerns in the moderated comment section below.
The future of MIDI hardware is created together.
I honestly would prefer if no AI was involved in the creation of music and its gear. AI in music has more often than not been used by stealing from artists that have no say in whether they want that or not. Making music generative is cool but not when AI is involved. If AI gets used in gear from CME I am boycotting them
Hi, I’m Matthew Whitaker. I’m a blind musician, I play keys, drums and a lot more, and I build accessible tools for my own studio.
This gets me excited mostly because of accessibility. A lot of MIDI setup happens in visual editors with drag-and-drop routing, and those can be really hard with a screen reader. If I could just say what I want, like “send my bottom keyboard to the organ and split the top one at middle C,” I could set up my own rig without asking for sighted help.
What I’d build first: when I switch setups, the box plays a short sound so I know by ear which one I’m on. I’d also want an “all notes off” footswitch for when something sticks mid-song. And whatever the AI builds should get read back to me in plain text, so I can check the routing before I play.
On the firmware question, keep the core protected. Whatever I build on top, I want the unit to keep working no matter what. A custom layer on top sounds like the right balance.
I’d be glad to help test this from a screen reader user’s side.
Keep Ai out of the creative arts, all ai out!
I’m going to add one of your cme widi “zigbee-like” boards to a rpi2040 based project. I hope it only needs coding on the rpi side but if the code inside the board itself could be “tweaked” maybe some nice ideas could arise such implementing OSC… Zigbee itself had some of these ideas implemented because its nature.
I have a lot of ideas (and some knowledge which makes my live coding not building from scratch) but I think your products could benefeit from community takes like this. I don’t want to solder smd and it seems ok to me paying for the hardware part so maybe some CC by licensing or similar could help keeping projects growing.
It’s not easy question and I think a lot lately due what’s going on with FM1s, Elektron, etc… and now Behringer/inMusic (Akai) proposals. Maybe it’s not for everyone but surely there’s an untapped market. In fact Korg has some interesting proposals since long ago…
It should be opened up in maybe a different product, cause I think this particular product is already highly configurable…also not the novation launchpad mk3 is very configurable to the point of that it can send keyboard commands only if that is what the user wants …. which is great.. just has to be practical .
What are the possible downsides, all this could bring is an immense increase of accessibility to extensive midi routing for the general public and is one of the few medians in which AI in music could be extremely beneficial!
I want my hardware to work reliability, not for it to be infinitely configurable to my specific wants. It’s not something I am interested in having.
In this AI vibe coding era, connectivity and scriptability have become mandatory requirements for my gear. I have no opinion in which way, Sysex, API, or Fw, as long as it supports a generic programming language.
I think this will be great. I would absolutely love to be able to configure a custom midi routing / mapping setup for my overgrown midi hardware studio. Back in the late 1980s I learned to write software specifically for that purpose, but don’t want to be tied to a computer all the time. I do think there should be some limits – don’t let just anyone write software to run on hardware if it could damage equipment should it go wrong. So, no electrical power management. But midi data sounds like a safe option.
Would be cool if system exclusivity was built in, and acted like a cloud of some kind enabling over midi, the ability to swap data in any direction, like wave files and PCM data. If there was just a device that could store and keep separate protocols for all the different midi compatible devices keyboards, drum machines and so on!. I have the H4MIDI WC built the WIDI in awesome, and the MIDI master kit.