Introduction to libwing

This is a library for discovering and controlling the Behringer Wing digital mixer over the local network. It also includes a series of utilities built using this library.

Included in this package are:

• An Rust library
• C API bindings for the Rust library
• wingprop: A command line utility for setting and getting property values, as well as looking at property schemas
• wingmon: A command line utility for monitoring your Wing's properies as they change in real time.
• wingmeters: An app to show some channel level meters of the Wing in real time.
• wingschema: A command line utility for generating a JSON schema of your Wing's properties, as well as updating a name to id mapping of Wing's properties. See below for more information on this mapping.

Additionally, you can find a dart package is also available for making Flutter apps that uses the C API.

Usage

This library is published at crates.io, so you can add the library to your Cargo.toml using cargo:

cargo add libwing
cargo build --all-targets

Check out the code in the tools/ subdir for simple utilities that discovers, connects, and do various simple things with libwing.

FFI/C API

The library provides a complete C API through FFI bindings. This allows seamless integration with existing C/C++ code while maintaining memory safety through Rust's ownership model.

See libwing.h for the complete C API.

propmap.rs, empty-propmap.rs, and propmap.jsonl

This library includes a very large mapping of property names, IDs, types, and parent IDs in propmap.rs. It's over 78,000 entries and adds about 1MB to your binary. It will also use a few MB of RAM when loaded.

The Wing's Native protocol only really deals with IDs, so if you ever want to print a property name or look up a property ID by name, you need this mapping. If you are happy to hard code the IDs in your code and never need to use the names of the properties, you can disable this mapping feature.

This mapping can be generated by running the wingschema utility. Running this utiltiy will create propmap.rs and propmap.jsonl. propmap.rs can be copied to src/ to update the property mapping built into the library, and the jsonl file is for your reference.

If you want to eliminate the list of name-to-ID mappings built into the code, you can copy empty-propmap.rs over the propmap.rs included. Note, you will break some of the utility of the utility programs if you do this. You can also use empty-propmap.rs if you corrupt your propmaprs.rs somehow.

The default propmap.rs and propmap.jsonl included in this repo was generated from a Wing Compact running 3.0.5 firmware and contains over 78,000 entries.

The dynamic nature of the Wing's properties, especially FX slots

The listing of the properties is dynamic in nature. For example, if you have an FX1 with a type of "NONE", the children of /fx/1 will be limited to just a few properties. But if you load an effect into that FX, now the children of /fx/1 will be much larger. For example, setting the type to "EXTERNAL", /fx/1/trim will come into existance.

wingschema cycle through all the types ("mdl" property) and request the full schema of that subtree. This will give you a more complete schema of the Wing's properties. I only know of the property trees with a property called mdl right now, so the FX slots, the GATE slots, EQ slots, etc... are tested in this way. If you find other properties that are dynamic in nature, please post a Github issue or offer up a pull request to wingschema to fix this.

**Note that you will mess up your Wing properties. Do a snapshot save of your Wing before running wingschema and restore it afterwards. **

wingprop utility

wingprop can do the following tasks:

• get a property value
• set a property value
• get a property schema

It also has an option to output as JSON (-j). Run wingprop --help to see the options.

wingmeters utility

wingmeters is a grphical app that shows you the output levels of the channels 1-16 in realtime. Just run it with no arguments (it'll discover the Wing on the network for you). Now make a channel make noise and you should see meters jump around. Run wingmeters --help to see the options.

wingschema utility

wingschema will request every property schema and save them to two files. As of firmware 3.0.5, there are over 78,000 entries. See above about more information about the two files as well as how you can use this to update the property map in the library. Run wingschema --help to see the options.

wingmon utility

wingmon is a utility that prints out property changes on your Wing. Just run it with no arguments (it'll discover the Wing on the network for you). Walk over to your Wing and touch a button or move a fader. You can also use the Wing apps to change properties. You'll see all the things that changed printed to the console. Run wingmon --help to see the options.

Protocols

There are 3 protocols available for controlling the Wing:

• The Native protocol
• The OSC protocol
• The Discovery protocol

The Native and OSC protocols (and much much more) are documented here (as of Wing firmware v3.0.5) by Patrick-Gilles Maillot. He's also created a few other utilites for the Wing. A copy of that document is checked in to this repo just in case the above link is not available. The file is called Wing-Remote-Protocols.pdf.

The Wing's Native protocol is a binary protocol that is more efficient and reliable than OSC. It is the protocol used by all the Behringer Wing apps to communicate with the Wing.

libwing implements the Native protocol and the Discovery protocol.

libwing does not implement the OSC protocol, but there are many other libraries available that do support OSC.