About
Rea-Sixty is built by Frank Acklin at Störsender Studio in Switzerland. One person, one DAW, one pair of control surfaces that deserved better software.
Why it exists
The UF8's scribble strips can show track colours — but only inside SSL 360°'s Plugin-Mixer layer, and only with an SSL plug-in loaded on every track. In a hundred-track session that is not a setting you turn on, it is a wall you hit. And because SSL 360° claims the controller's USB interface exclusively, no small helper tool can sit alongside it and fill the gap.
So the only way to get track colours onto the hardware was to replace the host software entirely. That is what this is.
How it was built
SSL's Plug-in Mixer protocol is vendor-specific USB. It is not MIDI and it is not documented anywhere. The repository's first commit is dated 19 April 2026, and the work behind it looked like this:
- Capture. Wireshark and USBPcap on Windows, recording the wire while SSL 360° drove the hardware. Hundreds of pcaps, each labelled with exactly what was triggered — a fader move, a colour change, a knob touch, a layer switch.
- Diff. For every frame, idle baseline against trigger event. The bytes that appear are the bytes the trigger emitted. That is the whole method, repeated a few thousand times.
- Decode. Byte by byte: knob and button IDs, LCD zone addressing, colour palette indices, motorised fader pitch-bend, the Bus Comp VU motor commands, the three-state button LEDs, the scribble strip layout, the central LCD overlays.
Nothing was decompiled. No SSL binary, driver or firmware was disassembled, and none is redistributed. The traffic being observed is cleartext, between two components on a machine whose owner licensed both. The legal basis is written down rather than assumed.
What SSL said
“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.”
No partnership, no protocol documentation, and no objection to the project existing. Which means firmware updates that change the wire format are this project's problem to chase — a known and accepted cost.
How it is developed
In the open, on GitHub, under the MIT licence. Releases go out at a pace that surprises people — the project passed 40 tags in its first few months — because it is built on a working studio's daily driver and every irritation gets fixed the evening it shows up.
Support the project
Rea-Sixty is free and stays free. If it saved you an afternoon, buying a beer is a fair trade.
Donations as they stand are fine. Note that a move to paid tiers would change the project's legal footing — the interoperability rationale covers the non-commercial open-source case specifically.