Computers
OSC for the Win
October 04 2010 19:40
Open Sound Control (OSC) combined with an iPad is the
greatest thing ever. I've been playing with a couple
of apps lately for connecting to soft synths on my
Mac and the iPad makes the perfect controller.
TouchAble is an OSC interface for Ableton Live. I'm a big fan of Ableton and have come oh so close over the last few months to buying the Akai APC40 controller. I typically use a couple of smaller USB controllers with your standard fare of knobs and sliders, and they work great, but any mapping I can come up with is less than perfect. the Ableton guys have spent a lot of time considering their on screen GUI, and basically nothing but the APC40 is going to be a perfect fit. Enter TouchAble. It's really the greatest idea ever in control surfaces for this type of music creation software. I've played with it enough now, and for the hell of it used it to DJ at the local bar down the street the other night. (I'll throw some pictures up sometime. Aoki-san does a monthly "DJ Party" that has turned into a real geek hangout. Everyone brings in their latest toys and sets them up on the pool table, usually relating to music technology, and then we proceed to drink lots of beer and play music really loud.) Basically, I set up an ad-hoc wifi network on my Macbook Pro, and then connected the iPad to that. There's a small server that runs in the background on the Mac that's playing middle man to the iPad and Live, and passing the OSC commands between them. In the case of TouchAble the mapping is defined by the developer, and so far they have hit all of the basic controls. You can see existing hooks for more features to come, but what's there is already great. And stable. Being Stable is huge given the level of complexity you start getting into when you are running multiple applications syncronized (maybe via the Apple MIDI networks) and then even across a TCP/IP network. Crashing or even skips and pops are out of the question if you are doing anything live in front of an audience. I spent about two hours with TouchAble and has zero hiccups. Response time is excellent and I saw no lag between say moving a software slider in the iPad and seeing the corresponding slider move in Ableton.
OpenOSC is another app I've been playing with, but haven't spent as much time with. It's basically the exact same set up as TouchAble (the middle man server even looks exactly the same, hmm) but instead is it touted as a general purpose touch screen controller interface for anything. You use an editor (Mac, Linux, Windows) and then upload your button/knob/slider template to the iPad. It's a very practical collection of widget. I'll be playing with it more in the future for sure, and the customizability of it makes it very attractive. $3. Cheap. Totally worth it.
Touchscreens with multiple touch point interfaces are the future of music software control. No doubt.
TouchAble is an OSC interface for Ableton Live. I'm a big fan of Ableton and have come oh so close over the last few months to buying the Akai APC40 controller. I typically use a couple of smaller USB controllers with your standard fare of knobs and sliders, and they work great, but any mapping I can come up with is less than perfect. the Ableton guys have spent a lot of time considering their on screen GUI, and basically nothing but the APC40 is going to be a perfect fit. Enter TouchAble. It's really the greatest idea ever in control surfaces for this type of music creation software. I've played with it enough now, and for the hell of it used it to DJ at the local bar down the street the other night. (I'll throw some pictures up sometime. Aoki-san does a monthly "DJ Party" that has turned into a real geek hangout. Everyone brings in their latest toys and sets them up on the pool table, usually relating to music technology, and then we proceed to drink lots of beer and play music really loud.) Basically, I set up an ad-hoc wifi network on my Macbook Pro, and then connected the iPad to that. There's a small server that runs in the background on the Mac that's playing middle man to the iPad and Live, and passing the OSC commands between them. In the case of TouchAble the mapping is defined by the developer, and so far they have hit all of the basic controls. You can see existing hooks for more features to come, but what's there is already great. And stable. Being Stable is huge given the level of complexity you start getting into when you are running multiple applications syncronized (maybe via the Apple MIDI networks) and then even across a TCP/IP network. Crashing or even skips and pops are out of the question if you are doing anything live in front of an audience. I spent about two hours with TouchAble and has zero hiccups. Response time is excellent and I saw no lag between say moving a software slider in the iPad and seeing the corresponding slider move in Ableton.
OpenOSC is another app I've been playing with, but haven't spent as much time with. It's basically the exact same set up as TouchAble (the middle man server even looks exactly the same, hmm) but instead is it touted as a general purpose touch screen controller interface for anything. You use an editor (Mac, Linux, Windows) and then upload your button/knob/slider template to the iPad. It's a very practical collection of widget. I'll be playing with it more in the future for sure, and the customizability of it makes it very attractive. $3. Cheap. Totally worth it.
Touchscreens with multiple touch point interfaces are the future of music software control. No doubt.
Touch Book
October 19 2009 12:30
I ordered one of these guys a few months back:
Always Innovating's TouchBook
This is an ARM CPU (TI OMAP3530: the same Cortex A8 as the BeagleBoard) based netbook/tablet. I'm not expecting this to necessarily become my main portable device, but it looks like it has a lot of promise. They are doing their own Linux image, which is kind of interesting, but advertise other distros and setups such as Android as being already running. Drivers will require futzing for other distros of course. Although, I really can't see Android working on a netbook. The fatal flaw of projects such as Moblin in the past has been in treating these smaller computers as being less than real computers. These are very capable machines being able to run a full desktop enviroment. There's no need to treat them as a traditional PDA with a slimmed down OS. Android might look good on a smartphone, but would be completely wasting the hardware of a real computer. Ya, I'm not a big fan of Android. Always Innovating is doing a tradition desktop alongt with a "3D Menu System" that is based on the touchscreen. Having been working on these types of UIs for a while now I'm very curious to see what they have put together there. But it's all moot, considering the fact that they haven't even shipped mine yet. There are reviews out there by people who have actually received these machines and the reaction seems mixed. I will be making my own conclusion on this one. Hopefully soon.
Always Innovating's TouchBook
This is an ARM CPU (TI OMAP3530: the same Cortex A8 as the BeagleBoard) based netbook/tablet. I'm not expecting this to necessarily become my main portable device, but it looks like it has a lot of promise. They are doing their own Linux image, which is kind of interesting, but advertise other distros and setups such as Android as being already running. Drivers will require futzing for other distros of course. Although, I really can't see Android working on a netbook. The fatal flaw of projects such as Moblin in the past has been in treating these smaller computers as being less than real computers. These are very capable machines being able to run a full desktop enviroment. There's no need to treat them as a traditional PDA with a slimmed down OS. Android might look good on a smartphone, but would be completely wasting the hardware of a real computer. Ya, I'm not a big fan of Android. Always Innovating is doing a tradition desktop alongt with a "3D Menu System" that is based on the touchscreen. Having been working on these types of UIs for a while now I'm very curious to see what they have put together there. But it's all moot, considering the fact that they haven't even shipped mine yet. There are reviews out there by people who have actually received these machines and the reaction seems mixed. I will be making my own conclusion on this one. Hopefully soon.
New Toy
June 10 2009 00:02
So my new toy is a Sony Vaio P. I've had several of the previous little Sony Vaios (505TX!) and had to jump on this one after playing with the keyboard more and realizing I could comfortably touch type on
it. Here is is running Ubuntu 9.04. Basically everything is working, including the Poulsbo chipset driver with a recent kernel and x.org 7.4. The PSB driver is a complete pain in the ass, and even now I don't have it working optimally. The brightness control is working and the general video speed is not bad, but my coworker running Debian on his with the same patches on the same driver is getting much better performance. A mystery to me there. No 3D or video decoding working at this time. I intend to switch over to Debian after all. (The only reason I didn't install in the first place was because the Sky2 ethernet driver used for the built in ethernet is not included with the Debian net install, but I have a supported USB adapter now.) Otherwise, runs great. Definitely a nice little machine.
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