Thanks to everybody who threw me pointers after Monday’s post on remote keyboard controls for Ardour. THE WINNERS ARE YOU! Also a winner is me, particularly thanks to If on Tumblr letting me know about OCS, a control protocol for sound software. Ardour supports it! Ardour was even an early adopter…

…which means they do everything differently to everyone else, which makes it L33T HAX TIEMS! Or, well, flaily hax tiems, to all honesty. So, in TouchOCS, I made a thing:

Devices!

…that also works on iPad…

BIGGER devices!

…and since TouchOSC exists on Android, it should work there too.

TouchOSC doesn’t want to talk the flavour of OSC that Ardour speaks, so it talks to a minor variation on this PureData script which translates it to Ardour’s dialect. So far all I can get working are transport controls, but that’s what I really need anyway. But look, it works!

If I have time I’ll learn more about PureData and add more commands. There are ways around the limitations of TouchOSC, they just aren’t accounted for in the script I pulled down off ardour.org.

Here’s the TouchOSC panel data file for the control surface in the pictures. Consider it Creative Commons Open Source yadayada go play with it. It’ll work with the stock PureData script I linked above, modulo the edits you have to make to have PureData running on your machine.

ALSO! You guys sent int two other good DIY toolkit pointers. They’re good for making haxy special controllers and I might yet use them for something else. First, lj:cdk pointed out that Ultimarc makes a bunch of interesting controller parts. Very cool stuff, lots of options for building. And second, an even more interesting device appears courtesy If, who pointed me at Makey Makey, an interface so flexible you can literally connect a banana and use it as a control toggle.

Obviously someone needs to use a banana to drive Fruit Ninja.

Thanks again to everybody who threw out ideas and suggestions!