[LAU] Building an Open Source keyboard rig

[Ben Bell]

On Sat, Mar 05, 2016 at 08:06:42AM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> They say that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.
> I say that those who do not know history should google for "lionstracs
> keyboard", although they may still end up repeating history anyway.

And before that there was the OpenNeko, and from memory another one before
that too. I don't know the history of what happened to Lionstracs but from
memory they were all taking the approach of taking a general purpose computer
and welding a synth keyboard onto it. They wanted to have a standard desktop
GUI and run any software available for Linux. Definitely lots to learn from
there.

The reason I like the Nord Stage is because it's very much the opposite
direction. It's not a workstation keyboard. It's not bringing a standard
computer UI to a keyboard, it's taking a musician-oriented view of the
interface. No menu diving, just buttons, knobs and switches to control
the things you need as you're playing.

There's also been a lot of change since those projects. Useable solid state
storage and the explosion of interest in smaller form-factor devices are two
major game changers. Len mentioned the MOD duo, which is much more the sort of
direction thing I'm persinally interested in than a frankenserver running
KDE with a bank of ivories attached.

bjb