smartfade 2496 and 1296?

Unfortunately a fundamental limitation of MIDI is that data flow is all one-way ('simplex') and even if we used both In and Out it's not fast enough to get the information quickly enough to be useful.

MIDI was originally designed to be used for overall synchronisation of musical playback, and has since extended into show control.

Thus we can use MIDI to tell a SmartFade (and many other consoles) "Play Stack Cue X" or "Move Fader Y to Z%", but they can't reply to tell us what's actually recorded into that memory.

SmartSoft connects via USB to one console, and gets all the information about that particular console over the USB link. USB is both bi-directional and very fast, so we can easily share the showfile and current status between the PC and one SmartFade.