[LAU] beatrix + eeepc + nanokontrol

oz oz at bluemonk.de
Sat May 30 18:10:50 EDT 2009


Hello,

I'm doing the first steps with a hammond clone on my eeepc 901 with  
Debian/squeeze. My intention was to use "drawbars" for fast access and  
therefore I tried the universal Korg nanokontrol, which has 9 sliders  
and usb-midi.

Beatrix runs from its binary and outputs to /dev/dsp1. The midi-merge  
of my separate keyboard and the nanokontrol I do with qjackctl and  
alsa. Because beatrix has no native jack-support, I make use of a  
virtual midi-port provided by snd_virmidi. After loading this  
kernelmodule with 'modprobe snd_virmidi' a virtual raw midi-port  
appears in jacks connection window and its name  
"midi.device=/dev/snd/midiC3D0" I put in beatrix' default.cfg.

With this midi-input I can now connect several midi devices, namely my  
keyboard, nanokontrol and a virtual keyboard (vkeybd) in jacks  
connection table.

The 9 sliders of the nanokontrol can be freely assigned to have the  
right CC values from 70 - 78 for beatrix. This has to be done with the  
free Korg Editor and I used an old Mac mini for that. These settings  
are permanently stored as "scenes" in the nanokontrol, which has  
standard usb-audio and is powered by the usb-bus.

But nanokontrol cannot send program change messages, only CCs. Because  
all sound-settings like percussion, vibrato, rotary for example are  
done by these programchanges in beatrix, I installed the  
Debian-package vkeybd, from which you can send all these parameters  
with just one mouse klick. Thanks to the instructions from:

http://arnout.engelen.eu/index.php/Beatrix

The expression pedal for volume swell and the sustain pedal for rotary  
slow/fast from my midi-keyboard works out of the box.

A few things are left to be done for me. I want to have all midi- and  
dsp-interface-ids bootfix. And all needed programs should start from  
one desktop-link or script (beatrix, qjackctl with all connections and  
vkeybd). Eventually the virtual midi-connections can be scripted  
easier with aconnect instead of qjackctl. If someone uses aconnect for  
this purpose, it would be nice to read about ist.

cheers,
oz




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