Steinberg announced today that their Cubase iC controller app for iPhone and iPod touch is now available. If you’re a Cubase 5 user, this app gives you loads of control over your set wirelessly. It looks great, even if you have an existing controller – it’s just like having an extra, more pocket-able remote control. Control features:
Position: Check out the clever position displays and feedback
Transport: You can jump to markers, toggle the metronome and precount and cycle, and punch in recording.
Arranger: Turn arranger on and off, play, and jump within an arrangement. You even get interactive buttons with labels for arrangement points, as pictured below.
Novation’s Automap is coming to the iPhone – meaning a handheld device can provide interactive visual and textual feedback about what you’re manipulating in, say, an Ableton Live set.
Our friends at Hispasonic (Spanish-language) bring us the news. (Thanks, Xavier!) Photo credit: the new blog SaM’s burrow:
That gives you a closer look. I’m not even going to try to wonder what happened to Novation’s NDA. (We seem to be getting mostly “D.”) But, Novation, if you’re out there, trust me – buzz already suggests this is a good leak for you.
On the Ableton forums, some naysayers wonder why you’d want to run a Live set from an iPhone. The answer is, naturally, you wouldn’t – I think they’re missing the point. There are two larger issues here. One is, having a handheld device means there’s just another intelligent way to control your music set. It might be something you prop atop your keyboard or drum pad controller as a small dashboard, or that you carry with you so you can hear the sound in a venue during sound check. The other message is, interactive control with actual labels on parameters is the future for a lot of devices, not just the iPhone. That’s in stark contrast to the primitive way in which MIDI refers to everything in terms of (typically) meaningless numbers.
In fact, there are some promising other attempts to more easily see and manipulate clips away from your laptop screen, on devices like the Lemur. Thanks to the Live API (on which Max for Live’s control of Live is also based), it’s possible to finally get a full, controllable view of your clips. My only criticism would be that we still lack a single, open standard for this stuff. If Ableton Live supported OpenSoundControl (OSC) natively, it’d open all sorts of applications – without the hacking currently required. But that’s a topic for another day, and not just directed at Ableton.
Here’s the full text of this announcement from the Ableton forums. Stay tuned; hopefully we’ll hear official news soon.
One of the problems with touchscreens is that, even as they have become more sophisticated about tracking multiple fingers at once, they still generally don’t respond to pressure. To make touchscreens really useful for music, we need genuine pressure sensitivity.
For that reason, you may be intrigued to see this video of Zen Piano, a demo app for the iPhone and iPod touch. The idea: respond not only to the position of your finger taps, but also to how hard you’re tapping the phone That promises “velocity-sensitive” tapping, which would make touchscreen interfaces more powerful.
Here’s the somewhat overheated description by GreatApps, who say their “patent-pending,” “cutting-edge” technology is the result of “having gone through the research and development phases.”
TapForceTM has been developed from the ground up to provide a completely intuitive way of interaction for users. It can detect more than a hundred different levels of force, and has an accuracy that has to be seen to be believed. And all this can now be done in software, no hardware modifications are necessary. Hundreds of millions of devices currently on the market can make use of the TapForceTM technology today.
A whole new range of games and apps has just been made possible.
It appears that network changes in Mac OS 10.5.7 could adversely impact some hardware, specifically the Euphonix EuCon line of controllers. Here is information sent to customers today – thanks to reader Oliver Lucas for spotting this.
Please note that the new Mac OS update released yesterday, Version 10.5.7, breaks support for the feature in EuControl that automatically detects what control surfaces are attached to your network.
Euphonix is working on a fix – please DO NOT update your Mac OS until we release a software update that addresses the issue, as your MC Mix/MC Control will not be seen by your Mac.
For those users who have already updated to Version 10.5.7, you can roll back your Mac OS to the previous version if you are using Time Machine.
The Akai APC40, the result of a collaboration between Akai and Ableton, has made its way into the wild. Here’s the first hands-on video – I have to say, I love the green lights. Who would have thought that Matrixsynth green would be the shade this year? You can thank AudioMIDI.com for getting the loaner out in the world.
Not a whole lot to see in this very first video, but it does give you a feel for what the hardware itself is like.Update: AKAI requested that the first video in this story be removed by its author on Vimeo, so we no longer have a video to embed.
The integration between software and hardware we should see revealed more over the coming weeks. I’m hoping to get my hands on one myself in the near future; I haven’t yet.
Of course, the APC isn’t alone. I’m still eagerly awaiting the Ohm64 from Livid, a beautiful controller with a wooden body, made with care in the US. Unlike the APC, the Ohm has a customizable MIDI response — the way the hardware itself responds is programmable. And, of course, there’s still the classic monome (site | cdm tag), open source hardware with an elegant minimalist design. Custom Max control patches have made the monome a favorite, especially for those with the chops to not only use the community-made patches, but build their own – by coincidence, the monome folks just posted a link to a library of Max monome objects. For both the Ohm and monome, it’ll be easier and more powerful to integrate Max objects with Live when Max for Live ships later this year. Even the APC will get its own custom patches. And, as Hédi points out, there’s also the elegant, compact, solidly-built Faderfox, which could also get a new lease on life with Max patching.
The upshot of all of this: even if people are using the same controller, they won’t necessarily use it the same way, which is how it should be. Stay tuned.
Update: this just in – a second video of the APC, this one sent to us by our friend Stephan Vankov (tetmusic.com). We’ve seen Stephan before, tearing up a wild audiovisual remix of The Karate Kid with the crew at the CDM NAMM party last year. It’s nice to see the APC out of the trade show floors, naturally.
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