MPE Insight 2.2 adds a new way to read harmony, a new keyboard design, a new FORGE pass, and a change that quietly touches every module: the app now reads the pitch bend range your instrument actually reports.
Weave: harmony as shape
The Grand Staff gets a fourth mode, and it drops the staves entirely. Pitch is no longer a height, it is a position on an interval field: one step to the right is a fifth, the two diagonals are the major and minor third. Everything the mode shows follows from that. A chord becomes a
shape, and every major triad is the same triangle in every key. Transposing moves that shape instead of redrawing it. Voice leading becomes distance. Pitch bend climbs straight up through the field, so the length of the trail is the interval.
Two looks (Instrument and Glow), field width, afterglow so released chords linger as fading figures, key gravity, triad fill, and labels that read as scale degrees or note names.
Pixel Grid: an eighth keyboard design
An LED raster lit from above, in three layouts:
Piano (the key silhouette drawn in dots),
Fingerboard (equal semitone columns, no key shapes) and
Grid (one lane per MPE channel). Glow Trail and Splash combine freely, with their own density and pixel size. Three presets included.
Retro Pixel VHS: a new FORGE pass
Runs last, on the finished frame: scanlines with a slow rolling tracking bar, a phosphor dot glow raster, RGB chroma tear that bursts on every strike in MPE mode, grain, and a duotone tint with its own colour. All five controls are available as Conductor targets.
MPE Insight now reads your instrument
Bend used to be drawn against an assumed 48 semitones. The app now listens for the pitch bend range your controller reports (RPN 0) and draws every bend at its true size, per channel and per MPE zone. The Keyboard, CASCADE, AURA, the Grand Staff and the Expression Overview all follow it, and CASCADE and AURA have a new
Auto (from instrument) setting that is on by default. Fixed values stay available as a display zoom for making small bends legible.
CASCADE
- Sustain pedal (off by default): a pedalled note keeps drawing until the pedal lifts, instead of ending with the key
- Beat and bar grid (off by default): phase locked to incoming MIDI clock, so you can see whether a note landed on the beat
- Much lighter note rendering: a note without modulation now draws up to 40 times fewer shapes, so dense .mid files scroll far more smoothly
Fixes
- Chords played on a single MIDI channel, which means any non-MPE keyboard and any single channel .mid track, showed as one note in CASCADE, the Keyboard and AURA, and stayed lit until the last key came up. Every module now reads held notes directly
- Fast notes are no longer lost between frames, and two strikes inside one frame no longer read as a single long note
- MIDI channel 16 was treated as a member channel instead of the upper zone's master, which scaled bend wrongly in every module at once
- A sustain pedal message with no matching release could hang every note that followed, out of reach of the panic button. The panic button now clears it
- The released key of a non-MPE chord could stay lit on the Keyboard and the Grand Staff
- AURA Tonewheel: the glowing note marker stayed on the struck key while its trail moved away. It now follows the sounding pitch
- The Keyboard calibration sliders (Intensity, Brightness Ring, Size) did nothing until the next note arrived
- If you also run the standalone build, its installer no longer clears your saved snapshots when you install a new version over an old one
