Comments on: Messe: Dexter, the DAW-Friendly, Surround Sound Follow-Up to Lemur Touchscreen

By: surroundlive

surroundlive — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 22:14:09 +0000

here it is I must do surround.
i must get things! do i wait for apple
or another company?

should i get dexter?
when is it out?
is it the exact same as a lemur
and then extra on top - or is it
totally differant?

are there any other surround mixers anywhere
ever at all?

By: basshell

basshell — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 10:20:48 +0000

I hope jazzmutant do well with the dexter…i own a lemur and it is one ov the best purchases i have made in the past year or two..

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 05:22:33 +0000

Hi Vance, I like the customization, definitely. One thing I hoped JazzMutant would add is the ability to move between screens using on-screen controls. Right now, you’re restricted to the hardware buttons for paging through them.

Yes, you need to adapt controls to a touch screen. I do know people who have used touch-screen monitors to produce interfaces — Tim Exile does it with Reaktor. This is single-touch, mind you, because that’s what’s available, but the finger width principle remains relevant.

Look at how useful KAOSS Pads are, with NO interface and a simplistic X/Y grid (well, now a matrix layout). I think there are lots of possibilities here. There are also other gestural avenues the Lemur and Dexter haven’t explored. So I think this area is far from exhausted, even in terms of what JazzMutant can do with their own technologies.

By: Vance Galloway

Vance Galloway — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:31:17 +0000

For me, the appeal of the Lemur is the fact that the surface is so instantly reconfgurable - 32 faders one moment, 16 faders and 8 panners the next, 64 knobs the next…..

In my live (meaning both in front of an audience and Ableton Live) setups, I often want to control 16 faders, and 12 aux sends from each fader, and parameters in 8 to 20 plugins. I have very elaborate MAX/MSP patches set up to help me achieve this using a simple (and CHEAP) BCR2000, but it’s not quite satisfactory.

The times I have worked with the Lemur it seemed that it would be entirely possible to set up a system that would be ideal. I also do most of my live sets in surround, so the Ball type controller is very attractive to me…..

A multi-touch SCREEN would be nice, but I am not sure that some folks who are advancing this concept realize that you really need to create some type of custom interface for your applicaitons to be able to make effective use of a touch screen. Trying to control many of the standard on screen UI objects using a touch screen is really, really hard. You really need large, kind of clumsy, fat controls when using a touch screen. This has been one universal truth I have found while demoing/using/modifying/hacking dozens and dozens of different models in the last 5 years. It’s way harder than it would seem to be. Then again, I HOPE someone will proove me wrong on this point sometime in the near future!

By: DJ McManus

DJ McManus — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 05:34:22 +0000

Ahh Skittles, they aren’t just for crackheads you know.

By: Damon

Damon — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:24:49 +0000

Purchase 10 thousand packs of Skittles, and you get 1 of these for free. With proof of purchase, of course.

By: DJ McManus

DJ McManus — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:49:33 +0000

Could you not have a box with four independent monotouch (youknowwhatImean) screens all side by side like a window frame. Maybe throw a ribbon controller in.

I still think running a mouse in each hand would rule!

The guys in Kraftwerk aren’t worried about looking like emailers on stage so why should you.

Embrace the mouse! “Ride the mouse… to the lake … the mouse is long … seven miles … erm, sorry.

Someone make an app that allows 2 usb mice to be recogized at the same time. That would be sweet. 2 trackballs?

The Lemur looks cool but I’ll never see one.

By: eshefer

eshefer — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:54:49 +0000

Well, from what I understood from the jazzmutant guys the price of the dexter is going to be higher then the lemur (to reflect development costs). when asked what do they feal are their direct competitors to the dexter the rep answered that highend daw interfaces such as the mackie control. that sort of makes sence, I guess.

Dexter’s OS is totaly different then the lemur, and they plan to have a dual boot option between the two os’s.

I’ve played with it a bit - it’s very cool, you just have to see the surround mixing control, which might be a killer app for this perticular piece of gear.

I personally agree that JM products are a bit out there, in terms of real world usage needs (taktility, high learning curve for the lemur, high price, accuracy which seemed to me somewhat flacky) - but still, JM seemed to me to be the most interesting booth at the messe.

By: james

james — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:50:19 +0000

i just ordered a touchscreen overlay for my monitor (a 30″ dell one) for less money than a lemur would’ve cost.. after a few months using a touchscreen laptop, mouse mixing and editting seems to painful for words. (literally as i have rsi now, but even without that..)

the multi touch thing will be a million times more useful once it’s part of the os. i hope apple doesn’t monopolise this, because buying a 50% markup sweatshop-made computer would make me sad.

By: Matt Stanton

Matt Stanton — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:04:01 +0000

Peter — I mostly agree with you. I think the appeal of the Lemur, though, is that it puts (or tries to put) the strong points of software and hardware together in the same package. Yes, you can get richer tactile control with a box of buttons, and yes, you can get fast iteration time and configurability from other software. But, unlike the Lemur, neither of those will give you both tactile control and configurability in the same package.

In the end, however, your point stands: the Lemur is frustratingly limited. Not only are you limited to a set of prefabricated widgets, but the widgets themselves resist creative reinterpretation. They do too much work to manage their own state, they can’t be created or deleted on the fly, and the OSC messages they send and respond to are unwieldy. None of the Lemur’s faults are beyond remedy, but it was when I started writing a Lemur UI library in Python to mitigate them that I realized just how ill-suited the Lemur was for my purposes. I ended up sending mine back.

Daniel offers perhaps the most compelling explanation I’ve heard for JazzMutant’s design choices. If I were them, I’d be terrified of Apple or someone else releasing a multitouch display that undercuts the Lemur on price. One sensible response to this worry might be to target one particular segment of the market where they can add value beyond the hardware. JazzMutant may have decided that DAW users in search of highly configurable control surfaces are their target market, that the JazzEditor and its widget collection are their value added, and that they’re willing to cede other potential multitouch users to a lower-priced competitor when one enters the market. That’s one theory, anyway.