First some terminology: a “group” is the 3x’s name for a what would usually be called a preset – a definition of what all the controls should transmit. For most uses one would have a group for each device one wants to control.
To select a group, press the “group” button on the bottom row (right of the cross fader) and then press the increment up/down buttons.
It is also necessary to set the mode of the machine. For most custom purposes you will select the “user” mode. Do this by pressing the “Mode” key. Each press cycles through the available modes.
By default, all controls generate messages on the same midi channel. The Bitstream 3x does not allow one to configure each control to transmit on a separate midi channel from the machine itself. To do this you need to use the configuration software. The software is a bit confusing and has a few bugs, here is the best way to set it up:
1. Set the Group name in the “Global Parameters” tab
2. In the “Assign User & Mackie/Logic modes” tab, do the following for each control:
a. click the control
b. change “Midi channel position (N) to 0 – setting it to zero makes it use its own control
c. change the text box to the right of it to the channel you want the control to send (the control is labeled “0=Fixed >> Channel”
d. Pick the midi cc to send in the “Use Standard Template” dropdown box
e. Set the LCD String
You can also type the midi string in directly but in my experience this can lead to errors when trying to save the settings to the machine.
Before you try to send/save the settings to the 3x hardware, press the Save icon. This will check the configuration and return any errors. If you attempt to save to the machine, the software will not signal an error until it attempts to copy the settings to the machine. This will stop the whole copy process and force you to fix the error and start again. You will save a lot of time by using the save button in the software as a method to check for errors before sending to the hardware.
In my experience, most errors tended to arise from typing in the midi string manually to save from dealing with the drop down boxes repeatedly. Sometimes it worked fine but other times I think the software got confused and would reset the controls to invalid values. After many such errors, I started using the drop down value pickers only and not manually typing in values.