Set up your DAW

Cubase & Nuendo

Jude speaks the Mackie Control Universal protocol and works with Cubase and Nuendo's Mackie Control device settings, over a virtual MIDI port. You add the device once in Studio Setup and you're connected. For big projects there's also a multi-surface setup that puts every track in the project live at once — that's further down the page.

Standard setup

  1. In Jude, open Settings → DAW and choose Cubase / Nuendo. Launch Jude before the DAW so the port exists when the DAW looks for it.
  2. In Cubase or Nuendo, open Studio → Studio Setup, click the + button, and add a Mackie Control device. Careful here: Mackie Control, not Mackie HUI — they sit next to each other in the list and HUI won't work.
  3. Set the device's MIDI input and MIDI output both to Project Jude.
  4. Click OK. The DAW light in Jude's header turns green when the DAW starts talking.

If you accidentally add Mackie HUI, Jude notices the wrong dialect on the wire and tells you exactly that — remove the HUI device and add a Mackie Control instead.

Good to know

  • The click stays on your side. Cubase and Nuendo don't expose the metronome to control surfaces, so toggle the click in the DAW — the engineer will remind you if you ask her for it here.
  • Eight channels at a time. The standard setup gives Jude a moving window of eight channels — plenty for tracking. If you want the whole project live at once, use the multi-surface setup below.
  • Updating from Jude 0.8.3 or earlier? Assign the ports in Studio Setup once more after updating — from then on Nuendo remembers them across relaunches.

Multi-surface setup — every track live at once

With the multi-surface rig, Jude publishes one Mackie Control port pair per eight channels — Jude MCU 01-08, Jude MCU 09-16, and so on — and the DAW treats them as one long console. The engineer then sees the state of every track in the project simultaneously.

  1. In Jude, open Settings → DAW and choose Nuendo MCU XT. Set Number of channels to cover your project (32 is the default and creates four port pairs).
  2. Open Studio Setup → MIDI Port Setup and untick every Jude MCU port in the "In All MIDI Inputs" column. Otherwise the surface traffic records into any armed MIDI track.
  3. In Studio → Studio Setup, add one Mackie Control device per port pair (again: not HUI).
  4. For each device, set its input and output to the same Jude MCU port pair.
  5. Order matters: the bottom-most Mackie Control in the Studio Setup device list must use Jude MCU 01-08, the one above it 09-16, and so on up.
  6. Check the wiring: play the project and watch Jude's channel strips light left to right across the whole panel. A dark stretch of eight means that port's device is missing or wired to the wrong pair.

Next: Talking to Jude — what to say, and what the engineer can do for you.