[LAU] Yet another audio interface post

[Renato]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:29:07 +0200
Daniel Mack <daniel at caiaq.de> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 11:16:52AM +0200, Renato wrote:
> > > Yes. I think i can hack something that emulates a MIDI interface,
> > > using ALSA or JACK.
> > > 
> > 
> > So you're thinking of writing it in C or similar (i.e. not pd or
> > sc)?? If you manage to get it working, I'd be interested to see the
> > code...
> 
> Just pondering ... Wasn't there a tool around which could map
> arbitrary input mesages to any other action? Wouldn't it be easier to
> just amend that tool so it can send MIDI messages?
> 
> Daniel

Yeah, Gizmod. 

http://gizmod.sourceforge.net/

With it you can easily write python scripts that
"translate" HID events - for example change your mouse clicks in typing
a key combo (ctrl+alt+something) or whatever. You could additionaly use
some python midi libs and you should be good to go.

I had abbandoned that way because I didn't know python, and as a
musician I preferred to invest my time in learning something more
music-specific (supercollider) hoping that I could more effectively use
that language even for other music-things.

A more ambitious project would be to write an app that recognizes *any*
connected HIDs and gives you some possibilty to generate some MIDI out
of them. That way one could hook up his joystick,mouse,Audio Kontrol,
Rig Kontrol, fire up the program and control MIDI apps. It would be
cool.

BTW there is an app for gaming, qjoypad, that does something similar:
it detects any joysticks and lets you "remap" buttons and axis
movements to keyboard (PC keyboard) and mouse events, so that you can
control with your joystick even games that don't have native joystick
support. It has also a nice and effective GUI, and the ability to save
profiles. 
I haven't looked at the code, but I guess it wouldn't be too difficult
to remove the "joystick filter" (having it list all HIDs, not just
joysticks) and adding MIDI support through some library.
I asked the dev some time ago about adding MIDI output support but he
didn't seem interested.

Whatever you end up doing, Pedro, definitely keep me updated ;)

cheers!
renato