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.

And Ableton Live 8 is officially out. Now, if Akai would just release the ACP40 everything would be right in the world. Slightly unrelated, but I recently picked up an M-Audio Solo for doing DJ type stuff. I wanted two audio outputs from the Macbook Pro so I could use one of them for cueing and the other for the main output. The Solo provides a single firewire output. To my shock and horror Ableton will only use one audio device at a time. I should have seen that one coming. I had basically given up when I came across a nice little feature in OSX: aggregate audio devices. In the Sound and Midi utility app (not control panel) you have the options for combining multiple audio devices into a singular virtual device. I have no idea if this is something available in other BSD flavors that Apple is just sticking a pretty front end on, but I suspect they have dug out the audio subsystem quite a bit and have redesigned it quite a bit. Anyway it goes, it's a very cool feature, and just one of many reasons Apple has always made OSes that have stood out for audio production. My days of using Windows for anything are long gone. Now if only the music production scene in Linux-land could do a little catching up.