Rea-Sixty drives the SSL UF8, UC1 andUF1 directly from a REAPER extension over their vendor-USB protocols. No SSL 360°. No virtual MIDI port. No MCU. No SSL plug-in on every track.
SSL's own approach puts a "360 Link" plug-in in front of every plug-in you want to control. FX Learn skips the wrapper entirely and maps any VST, VST3, AU or JS parameter directly — keyed so that renaming or reordering an FX does not break the mapping.
Colour and brightness per binding, per modifier. Make the destructive bindings red, leave Bank L/R dim until you actually use them. It survives restarts.
Your REAPER track colours land on the UF8 scribble strips in the DAW layer — with no SSL plug-in on the track. SSL 360° can only do this inside its Plugin-Mixer layer, with an SSL plug-in on every track.
Far more than NORM / REC / AUTO. Folder Mode, Send and Receive views, FX and Instance cycling, a markers-and-regions navigator, and eight Selection Sets per project.
SSL's UF8 scribble strips can show track colours, but only in SSL 360°'s Plugin-Mixer layer, and only with an SSL plug-in loaded on every track. A 200-track session would need 200 plug-in instances just to get colours. That is not a tradeoff, it is a wall.
SSL 360° also claims the controller's USB interface exclusively, so no helper extension can sit alongside it. Either you replace SSL 360°, or you live with the limitation.
“As there is no affiliation/association to SSL, we have no objections to the public, open source-project. Sadly we're unable to share any protocol documentation […] Thank you for reaching out and we look forward to seeing where the Rea-Sixty project goes.”
Rea-Sixty is built on passive observation of USB traffic between software and hardware the user already owns, under the interoperability exceptions in EU Directive 2009/24/EC Art. 6, §69e UrhG and 17 USC §1201(f). No SSL code or firmware is decompiled, included or redistributed. The details →
Before you install: Rea-Sixty and SSL 360° cannot share the hardware. On Windows the two drivers are mutually exclusive, and on every platform SSL 360° must be quit. You will still want to keep SSL 360° installed for firmware updates.