A Windows-equivalent for Hexler's TouchOSC

[ramthelinefeed]

Right, so now that I finally have a Surface Pro... TouchOSC is only out for iOS and Android

I refuse to even look at the crapware that is Miller Puckette's PureData (well, that's not strictly true, I tried to look at it the other day, but the website was down which makes me strongly suspect it's no more stable than it was when I wasted weeks of my life trying to use in on SGI IRIX in 1998...)

I just want a nice touch-optimised GUI set of widgets that I can programme to send various MIDI messages, that will run on that hugely obscure and little used operating system, Windows. Any suggestions?

[robinv]

Yep - Emulator Pro by SmithsonMartin - http://www.smithsonmartin.com - it's a beautiful piece of software that keeps on getting better and better. I included a review of it in my multi-touch video - http://youtu.be/4G4jIpdTuhY

[ramthelinefeed]

ah just the ticket, thanks

(Although their webshop keeps giving 404-errors! Can't get the staff, I expect)

[OneWorld]

That Lenovo 27" thing looks the answer to a lot of prayers - loaded with for example Kontakt/Komplete, Reason, Cubase/Sonar etc what more could a person want, be great if it had a dual output for a second monitor, there I go, wanting more already!

[ramthelinefeed]

SOrry to bump this thread,
but I was looking into this again.

I am trying to find out what the MIDI capabilities of 'Emulator Pro' are.
Downloading the user guide, it makes no mention of SysEx - it just shows examples of assigning MIDI CC's to the widgets.
I tried to look on their help forum, but if won't let you view the forum unless you register, and you can't register without a software serial number.

Can anyone who uses Emulator Pro enlighten me?

[robinv]

At the moment I've not been able to get on their website for weeks - not really sure what's going on there, so I can't get to the documentation or forum either. But looking at the interface all you get is MIDI numbers, so that's 0-127 I guess. Can't see any mention of sysex or anything. I did try to talk to them about Mackie control and such like which you'd think would include more indepth sysex type stuff but I couldn't get any sense out of them. There has been some changes with templates and stuff but every time I think to go and find out the website appears to be down.

[ramthelinefeed]

Well, sadly I think we can pretty much write this one off then, as it's clearly all gone Pete Tong.

Are there any other Windows applications which allow you to build touch sensitive widget sets that support arbitrary MIDI messages?

[robinv]

Aha - no - it was something wrong with my Hosts file that old SmithsonMartin redirects in it - all fixed now. It's still the best thing out there for touch control on Windows imho

[ramthelinefeed]

Aha - no - it was something wrong with my Hosts file that old SmithsonMartin redirects in it - all fixed now. It's still the best thing out there for touch control on Windows imho

Robin, with all due respect, if it can only send continuous controllers and not SysEx, it is barely a "thing" at all. It's just a complete non-starter.

[robinv]

Robin, with all due respect, if it can only send continuous controllers and not SysEx, it is barely a "thing" at all. It's just a complete non-starter.

Really? I can't think of any MIDI controller I have that sends anything other than controller data - sysex would usually be something I stick at the front of a sequencer or send via MidiOX. But if that's what you need then I guess you need to keep on looking. I didn't think TouchOSC did sysex either.... I think I must be out of touch of what the kids need these days

[DGL.]

Robin, with all due respect, if it can only send continuous controllers and not SysEx, it is barely a "thing" at all. It's just a complete non-starter.

Really? I can't think of any MIDI controller I have that sends anything other than controller data - sysex would usually be something I stick at the front of a sequencer or send via MidiOX. But if that's what you need then I guess you need to keep on looking. I didn't think TouchOSC did sysex either.... I think I must be out of touch of what the kids need these days

even the Behringer BCR/BCF supports sysex so it's not like it's unreasonable to expect it

[robinv]

An update for you - i was able to have a conversation with SmithsonMartin development and they say they don't plan to support sysex as it would require a whole re-write of their MIDI engine. They say only a handful of people have asked about it whereas they've had loads of requests for OSC support which is something they are working on.

I guess my only thought would be to run it through MIDI Translator or MIDI OX and route it to another program to deal with SysEx commands.... or something like that but i don't really know what i'm talking about and i'm not sure i'm being very helpful.

[Gerhard Westphalen]

I use Emulator Pro in my studio for a Hans Zimmer style control surface and it works great. It does freeze from time to time (maybe once every 2 weeks) but I keep it running 24/7.
I would say that it does lack some features like SysEx. The only things right now that it lacks for me is the ability to flip the xy pad. I use it for surround pan but the front back is reversed. You can rotate it but then left and right would be reversed.
TouchOSC is also pretty good if you get and iOS or Android but I haven't been able to use it in my studio because my computer has multiple network connections and I think the software doesn't look in the right network connection for the TouchOSC signal.

I have no idea how difficult this would be to do but what about making your own? I don't know anything about programming but maybe it would be possible to make something like Mark Wherry did for Hans Zimmer.

[ramthelinefeed]

Robin, with all due respect, if it can only send continuous controllers and not SysEx, it is barely a "thing" at all. It's just a complete non-starter.

Really? I can't think of any MIDI controller I have that sends anything other than controller data - sysex would usually be something I stick at the front of a sequencer or send via MidiOX. But if that's what you need then I guess you need to keep on looking. I didn't think TouchOSC did sysex either.... I think I must be out of touch of what the kids need these days

My Kenton Control Freak could send any MIDI byte sequence that was in the MIDI spec.
There's plenty of hardware devices and software where more obscure parameters respond only to SysEx sequences (typically with a couple of data bytes in the middle of the SysEx string - so for instance your Slider or Knob is configured to always send the big SysEx string but with those data bytes replaced by the current fader position)

[ramthelinefeed]

Can I be so bold as to bump this thread from years ago to ask, with all the dignity I can muster:
Are there any Windows applications which allow you to build touch sensitive widget sets that support arbitrary MIDI messages?

[ramthelinefeed]

Cycling 74's MAX is still going strong, I guess... although is a little overkill for my needs

[n o i s e f l e ur]

I'm not sure if it'll work, but it won't cost you anything to try - does the Lemur Editor send MIDI / OSC?

It'd be damnably clunky in operation methinks (necessary to tape down the "e" key on your computer keyboard for instance), but easily knocks TouchOSC into a cocked hat. That is if it actually does Tx / Rx like the iOS app itself.

I'd try it for you, but that would involve installing midi monitoring software, virtual drivers etc etc . . . and well, frankly I don't need to!

TBH you'd be better served by picking up a used iPad, anything from the ancient iPad 2 would suffice. Major caveats are, somewhat steep learning curve to get the most out of it, not helped by woeful to non-existent support. Oh, and SYSEX can be a PITA if you need to deal with long strings as Lemur is very limited in the length of messages / storage arrays (256 bit IIRC). Can be worked around with clever programming and concatenation but . . . well . . . like I said. PITA!

[n o i s e f l e ur]

Okay - bored, so tried out the Lemur Editor aaaaaand . . . nope. Doesn't transmit or receive MIDI, so that rules it out as a jerry-rigged Windows controller I'm afraid.

The caveats I already mentioned make it a poor, or at least risky investment if you were to go the iOS route expecting any kind of plug and play SYSEX editor to be frank. In point of fact, the whole touchscreen lark is a very unsatisfactory experience in any case.

It's the 3D TV of controllerism! The Aldi / Lidl of Jaffa Cakes!

Max may indeed be your best option, and for the iOS-inclined there's Mira;

https://cycling74.com/products/mira

I haven't looked at Mira since it was a free beta and wasn't quite full-featured. I expect it may be decently functional by now, some many years later.

[Eddy Deegan]

Okay - bored, so tried out the Lemur Editor aaaaaand . . . nope. Doesn't transmit or receive MIDI, so that rules it out as a jerry-rigged Windows controller I'm afraid.

The original Lemur Editor had no MIDI. It was only useful for developing and deploying 'apps' (which were mainly XML-based configurations) to the Lemur hardware. The Lemur hardware doesn't have have a conventional MIDI interface, but messages generated by the user interacting with the application deployed to it (as well as any generated by the script running on it) are sent over ethernet to a host (Mac or PC) which must be running the Jazzutant Daemon (at least that was the case on the Mac, I never used one on the PC at the time). This Daemon translates them and presents itself to other running apps as a virtual MIDI interface.

The above worked very well, but the original Editor and the Lemur are long since abandoned by Jazzutant which is a crying shame IMHO, it had so much potential.

Maybe you tried the Editor for the Android or IOS device version? I don't think that would work standalone either. The Editor (host) + Device (phoneor tablet) package is a paid app, but trivial compared to the 4-figure sum that the Lemur hardware sold at. Unless something radical has changed since I last looked, you can do all manner of creative and useful things if you have a MIDI interface for your device. I had the IOS version for a while before departing the Apple camp for unrelated reasons.

When I was an active user of it using the Lemur hardware I was always a little frustrated at the seeming lack of willingness on the part of Jazzmutant to address issues of usability and feature set but from the look of the latest versions it's come a long way.

It's a powerful and flexible platform and good stuff, basically.

[Eddy Deegan]

Cycling 74's MAX is still going strong, I guess... although is a little overkill for my needs

MAX is like a software modular only more engineery. I loved it... I have a license for a version from years ago and had a lot of fun with it, but moved on when I discovered that it only scaled so much and I wanted to do larger applications than it could handle.

The 'deploy a standalone executable' worked well too but had some issues with compatibility across different client setups. I don't know if that's still the case, I would be surprised if so as Cycling74 always seemed keen to improve it.

It's definitely a time-sink, but if you like that sort of thing it's time well spent. Loads of fun, especially when integrated with the Lemur over MIDI, though that did take extra work as you had 2 GUIs to maintain

[ramthelinefeed]

Yeah I have used Max before (the IRCAM flavour in the 1990s, not Cycling 74's commercial version).

Honestly though, all I wanna do is have a Windows app where I can plonk some simple widgets on the screen (sliders, buttons, etc) and map them to various MIDI messages, to actual as a programmer for various old bits of gear.
The thing is that some of my more vintage pieces of gear need this to include SysEx (so when you move the slider, it just changes the data bytes in the SysEx string) ... my Elektron SID Station is the main offender
But most of these cheap and simple Windows programs only work with 'continuous controller' messages.

But if I gotta fork out for Max I probably will, I guess.

[Eddy Deegan]

Honestly though, all I wanna do is have a Windows app where I can plonk some simple widgets on the screen (sliders, buttons, etc) and map them to various MIDI messages, to actual as a programmer for various old bits of gear.
The thing is that some of my more vintage pieces of gear need this to include SysEx (so when you move the slider, it just changes the data bytes in the SysEx string) ... my Elektron SID Station is the main offender
But most of these cheap and simple Windows programs only work with 'continuous controller' messages.

But if I gotta fork out for Max I probably will, I guess.

I'd say this is exactly the sort of thing that Max excels at. Not only do you get to design your own interface the way you want it, but you can also get very creative with the MIDI side of things if you're prepared to dive into a little bit of Javascript.

A number of years ago I created an editor suite for the Yamaha XS8 (sadly, never finished due to Max limitations) which relied heavily on Sysex and part of that involved reading and writing bytes directly to/from the MIDI interface in Max using a Javascript widget. It was a lot of fun and very educational as well.

Cycling74 offer a 30-day free evaluation of Max, so that might well be worth a bit of exploration!

[ramthelinefeed]

Oh yes, I know Max could definitely do this. It just can do about a thousand other things too, which I'm wary of getting distracted by

[n o i s e f l e ur]

Maybe you tried the Editor for the Android or IOS device version? I don't think that would work standalone either. The Editor (host) + Device (phoneor tablet) package is a paid app, but trivial compared to the 4-figure sum that the Lemur hardware sold at. Unless something radical has changed since I last looked, you can do all manner of creative and useful things if you have a MIDI interface for your device. I had the IOS version for a while before departing the Apple camp for unrelated reasons.

When I was an active user of it using the Lemur hardware I was always a little frustrated at the seeming lack of willingness on the part of Jazzmutant to address issues of usability and feature set but from the look of the latest versions it's come a long way.

It's a powerful and flexible platform and good stuff, basically.

Yep Eddy, the Windows editor. I was aiming for exercise-in-futility - not demonstration-of-insanity!

The Lemur app has definitely improved over the original hardware in terms of functionality, but the editor software is still a bloody useability nightmare where, if you're not intimately aware of its foibles . . . much lost work awaits.

There's also the many undocumented behaviours of the runtime to contend with.

[n o i s e f l e ur]

There's always ctrlr;

https://ctrlr.org/

^ To handle the SYSEX, mappable to any touch interface.