Appendix F

HUI Mode

What’s a HUI?

Mackie introduced HUI (Human User Inter- face) in 1997, one of the industry’s first affordable motorized touch-sensitive fader controllers available for Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs).

One of the big drawbacks of any DAW is having to use a mouse and keyboard to perform things you used to do on an analog mixer. Clicking on a visual representation of a fader and trying to drag the mouse smoothly in order to achieve an amazing fade-out is difficult, if not impossible, for many of us. Likewise, turning a “virtual knob” on a computer screen just doesn’t cut it for some folks. The HUI allows you to use familiar analog- style faders and knobs to control most of your DAW’s parameters.

HUI mode allows the Digital 8•Bus to work with your HUI-supported DAW via the MIDI interface. When HUI mode is active and the HUI layer is on-screen, you will see that the eight

right-most channel faders and the master fader are all that are active. This is because HUI’s MIDI mapping only provides for eight active channels at a time, but the Bank and Channel scroll buttons allow you to move back and forth across fader channels on the DAW mixing window. The Channel buttons scroll one channel at a time, and the Bank buttons scroll eight channels at a time.

Click the question mark button (?) in the upper right corner of the screen, and a map of the control section of the D8B appears on the left side of the screen, with numerical references over many of the buttons and a list of the HUI control functions provided by each button. At the end of this appendix, we have provided a chart showing how each of these buttons controls specific functions for several of the most popular DAWs supporting the HUI.

D8B Manual • Appendices • page 164