Hardware support brain dump
Tom Oinn
While we're waiting for a name and wiki space I'm putting the random
things that come into my head into a google doc, you should be able to
view and edit at the above URL. Take a look - it's far from complete
and I'd welcome help filling bits in, in particular for the mapping
section and for details of devices I don't own myself.
Cheers,
Tom
Philip Potter
that's really cool. I can tell you about the launchpad from my point of view:
it's an 8x8 grid of square buttons, with an extra round button at the
RH end of each row and an extra round button at the top of each
column. The buttons can be lit red, green, or yellow -- more
specifically, each button has a red LED and a green LED which can be
independently set to one of four brightness levels (off, low, medium,
full). It's operated through midi messages, both in (receiving button
presses) and out (setting LEDs).
It's designed for use with ableton live but I've totally ignored that
part so far. Live didn't seem very intuitive and I wasn't immediately
sure if it was what i wanted or not.
And the monome is pretty well documented on the monome website. It's a
box of 64, 128, 256 or (rarely) 512 buttons, which are also lights.
Phil
Tom Oinn
> Hey,
>
> that's really cool. I can tell you about the launchpad from my point of view:
>
> it's an 8x8 grid of square buttons, with an extra round button at the
> RH end of each row and an extra round button at the top of each
> column. The buttons can be lit red, green, or yellow -- more
> specifically, each button has a red LED and a green LED which can be
> independently set to one of four brightness levels (off, low, medium,
> full). It's operated through midi messages, both in (receiving button
> presses) and out (setting LEDs).
Cool - do you know if Novation have the MIDI spec online anywhere? I
found the one for the APC40 at http://www.akaipro.com/apc40map, if you
look at the PDF linked from the advanced section there that's pretty
much the info we'd need to add a new piece of hardware. You can
monitor for messages for the inputs easily enough to work them out,
but for things like LED control it can be a real pain to work out
what's going on (looking at the APC one I think it would have taken a
while to reverse engineer!).
> It's designed for use with ableton live but I've totally ignored that
> part so far. Live didn't seem very intuitive and I wasn't immediately
> sure if it was what i wanted or not.
I'm surprised by that, I find Live pretty much works the way I
expected it would, but then the APC is a very close mapping to the
software. I tend to think of it as a really nice sampler (and MIDI
sequencer) coupled to a fairly conventional mixing desk and effects
racking system. I still claim that many people on this list would
benefit from having a walkthrough of what some of the professional
commercial software is capable of, just to get some ideas. That's
particularly the case for people who are primarily coders interested
in music rather than musicians interested in coding.
> And the monome is pretty well documented on the monome website. It's a
> box of 64, 128, 256 or (rarely) 512 buttons, which are also lights.
Yup, does anyone have one? They seem very expensive for what they are,
especially when you can pick up four launchpads and glue them together
for a 16x16 grid! I'm wondering whether they have internal logic like
the APC series have which we'd need to know about when mapping them?
Tom
Sam Aaron
On 19 Jan 2012, at 12:25, Tom Oinn wrote:
>
> Cool - do you know if Novation have the MIDI spec online anywhere? I
http://www.novationmusic.com/support/launchpad/
Specifically:
http://www.novationmusic.com/download/668/
> Yup, does anyone have one? They seem very expensive for what they are,
> especially when you can pick up four launchpads and glue them together
> for a 16x16 grid! I'm wondering whether they have internal logic like
> the APC series have which we'd need to know about when mapping them?
>
I have three! They're much more aesthetically pleasing than the launchpads (at least to my eyes) and also more compact - so my 256 monome is far smaller than the equivalent gaggle of launchpads.
Sam
Tom Oinn
> Hi Tom,
>
> On 19 Jan 2012, at 12:25, Tom Oinn wrote:
>
>>
>> Cool - do you know if Novation have the MIDI spec online anywhere? I
>
> http://www.novationmusic.com/support/launchpad/
>
> Specifically:
>
> http://www.novationmusic.com/download/668/
Excellent - added those links to the doc.
>> Yup, does anyone have one? They seem very expensive for what they are,
>> especially when you can pick up four launchpads and glue them together
>> for a 16x16 grid! I'm wondering whether they have internal logic like
>> the APC series have which we'd need to know about when mapping them?
>>
>
> I have three! They're much more aesthetically pleasing than the launchpads (at least to my eyes) and also more compact - so my 256 monome is far smaller than the equivalent gaggle of launchpads.
Agreed, although the launchpads are arguably more flexible (four
launchpads can be re-arranged, and the multi-colour lighting is good
to have). No arguing with the aesthetic appeal of the monomes though.
Tom