5 Mar
2016
5 Mar
'16
2:54 p.m.
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