[linux-audio-dev] Midi/OSC help - Continuous controllers

[Olivier Guilyardi]

Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 01:44:18AM +0200, Olivier Guilyardi wrote:
> 
>>1 - a friend of mine showed me his brand new evolution uc33 midi 
>>controller. He's using that with a windows-based software called "Live". I 
>>was really suprised to see that this software use exactly what I proposed 
>>in this thread. First you enter a "capture-mode", you click on some GUI 
>>widget, then you rotate some knob, that's it : it's assigned. I promise I 
>>never saw a such thing when I had exactly the same idea.
> 
> 
> Doesn't ardour allow this type of binding midi CC's to mixer controls?

Sorry, I did not check that...

>>I believe there could exist a library with which :
>>1 - you instantiate a core object (providing the alsa midi port as an arg)
>>2 - you "attach" to some widgets : sliders, spin buttons, etc.. (note that 
>>this is different from extending (bloating) widgets)
>>3 - you may call a function to enter the capture-mode
>>4 - 100 % of this capture-mode is encapsulated by the library : 
>>knobs-to-widgets assignations are handled transparently
>>5 - there is some way to retrieve these assignations to recall them later
> 
> How does all this differ from midikinesis?
> http://lac.zkm.de//2005/proceedings.shtml

Wow, that's exactly what I'm talking about... Thanks for this great pointer !

Ref :
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~brinkman/software/midikinesis/midikinesis.pdf

Reading this document, I remembered something I forgot to mention : binding GUI 
components and midi events adds fancy knobs support to many graphical 
application, audio but also drawing (the gimp ?), etc...

Now, my approach is slighty different : I'd bind GTK widgets, and let QT, FLTK, 
etc.. for later. Peter did think about this, but prefered a low-level X 
approach, measuring its limitations and adding workarounds.

So, to your question "How does all this differ from midikinesis?", I answer : 
I'd bind the widget to the midi events, in a almost completely transparent 
manner, where Peter chose to record/playback X events which I dislike.

Peter states that from a practical point of view, his Midikinesis software 
solves a Linux specific problem, so that OS portability is not a key issue. To 
this, I want to add that many graphical application under Linux are around with 
GTK. Say half of what I personnaly use. So, to me, "Toolkit portability" is a 
secondary issue...

Instead of my library idea above, the straightforward way of extending widgets 
now again seems relevent to me. I'm now starting to think that a GtkHScaleMidi 
widget (among a few others) could be a great addition to GTK....

Thanks again for proving LAD I'm not crazy ;-)

--
   og