Mackie Control
A control-surface protocol that became the de facto standard for driving a DAW's mixer with real, motorised faders.
Mackie first built HUI with Digidesign for Pro Tools in the late 1990s, then in the early 2000s the Mackie Control Universal, originally in partnership with Emagic and Logic. The protocol runs over ordinary MIDI but bends it creatively: each fader reports its position as pitch bend on its own channel to get 14-bit resolution, buttons are note messages, and the display is filled via SysEx.
The surface shows eight channels at a time and pages through banks. What it offers over MIDI learn is two-way traffic — select a different track in the DAW and the faders physically move to match. Practically every budget controller now pretends to be a Mackie Control, because it is the one thing every DAW understands.