The beauty of using touch for controllers is flexibility. Sure, you give up tactile feedback – but you can also quickly make your own layouts, make touch controllers an ideal complement to your existing hardware gear (the stuff with physical knobs and faders and pads).

For that reason, we’re all eagerly anticipating an upcoming version of the awesome OSC-based iPhone/iPod touch controller, TouchOSC.

http://hexler.net/software/touchosc

The included layouts are already fantastic, with rotaries and virtual buttons and multi-faders and toggles and X/Y pads. But custom control would be even better. Creator hexler writes CDM with the latest:

The long-awaited update to TouchOSC that will allow for custom layouts has just been submitted for review to Apple,
so I hope that as soon as next week it will be available as a free update to all users on the App Store.

Together with this release (1.3) there will be a free editor application to visually design and upload layouts to the device. You can take a look at the last beta version I published if you want, there’s both Windows and OS X versions available, but I will also prepare a Linux version as soon as possible, of course without the new version of TouchOSC this is but a preview of things to come:

http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-editor-0.7-osx.zip
http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-editor-0.7-win32.zip
http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-default-layouts.zip

And nicely enough, the editor is built in cross-platform Java, which I think makes a whole lot of sense. (Go Java, Python, etc., rather than getting stuck in hard-to-port platform-specific stuff like Cocoa.)

Thanks, hexler! I don’t have a video of the new features yet, so instead here’s a nice novelty – the beginnings of a creation using the free SuperCollider (which runs OSC natively) in combination with TouchOSC to make a custom step sequencer. Should fuel other ideas, too:

There are always more events than we can post for a site with global readership. We’re working on an interactive CDM event calendar – suggestions welcome. But in the meantime, here are a couple of events that I hope some CDMers can attend and document for the site, because I wish I could be there.

Saturday night, there’s a huge convergence of wonderful people in Los Angeles. The lineup looks terrific (music: Speakers, Sahy-Uhns feat. Bucc Rogerz, Eli Walks, Owen Vallis, Counters, D-Funk), and there will be a new iteration of the Brick multi-touch table which we’ll be seeing here on CDM soon. Flyer below; watch MySpace for address details.

Sunday, there’s a free design workshop/demo by the creator of Where’s the Party At, the open source sampler, at Machine Project.

Rest up and enjoy.

Even online, words have a tendency to linger long after you write them. And I recognize that the risk here is not only what those words mean to me, but others, too. So I want to revisit a topic today in the interest of moving forward.

I wrote a kneejerk post earlier in the life of CDM about MonoTouchLive, a single-touch interface with UI widgets inspired by JazzMutant’s Lemur. MonoTouchLive was (and is) Windows-only, standalone software for controlling Ableton Live. It’s now free of cost.

I’ll be honest: in my original post, I overreacted, and I didn’t choose my words as carefully as I should have. Some regular readers called me out on it at the time. Since that time, I’ve tried to be more careful. Some comment threads referred back to it, though, and the developer, Pablo Martin, has continued to push his tool and has been outspoken about not liking what I wrote.

It’s now clear to me that I can’t just let this go, as Mr. Martin today has posted a multi-page diatribe focused largely on my short, now nearly three-year-old blog post.

A little of JUSTICE please

To be clear: I got carried away. I have since come to the realization that copying – loosely or closely – isn’t such a bad thing. They’re a learning process, and if something really is original, it does tend to shine through.

Also, to my knowledge, Mr. Martin is correct: the layout on the Lemur was apparently a mock-up to show what the Lemur would look like if configured with the layout of the MonoTouchLive. I incorrectly said that both the widgets and layout had been copied, as I misunderstood the image I saw. Axou created that design as part of a thread with some complaints about the similarity to the Lemur widgets, but I now try to make CDM less like a quick forum post.

Play this track:

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Liz McLean Knight aka Quantazelle catches up with one of our laptopist idols: edIT, the talented solo artist and Glitch Mob member. I won’t insult what he does by giving it a dumb name (”Glitch Hop?”). Suffice to say, edIT is adept at bringing insane musical chops to live laptop performance.

Liz got to geek out with edIT about the details of his live setup, which now drops the M-Audio Trigger Finger for the visual feedback and fluid multi-touch flexibility of a JazzMutant Lemur. (All due love to the Trigger Finger. But I think that would have been like, when I was a child, trading my Knight Rider Big Wheel for the full-sized KITT.)

edIT tells Liz just what this is all about, how he puts together his live set, and what the technical setup means for him musically. He also talks strategy. Sometimes, that means keeping the integrity of the tunes by loading changes into Ableton Live’s pre-composed Arrange View rather than triggering relatively mundane changes of loops manually. At the same time, that frees him up to work with more radical changes with effects and the like – stuff that may actually be interesting. So, no, just glimpsing the Arrange View will not land edIT on deadAct.com — in fact, edIT and Glitch Mob are just the kind of antidote we need.

Interview audio quality is low, but it’s well worth the listen for all the details.

While we’re at it, here’s more insight into edIT’s unique IDM and Hip Hop-inspired world, including the greatest anti-electronic music quotes of all time.

MSAFluid for processing (Controlled by iPhone) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

TUIO is a simple but powerful emerging protocol for multitouch control for live music and visuals, as used on the powerful live tangible synth reacTable. Apparently no one told Apple, however. While the App Store rubber-stamps useless toys like fake cigarette lighter flames, they bizarrely rejected a powerful application by a leading digital artist that would enable standardized TUIO control – for free. (More back story below; see an example in action above.)

As a blogger, my reaction is usually to whine and pontificate, for better or worse. The engineering approach would be to find some hack away the problem. That’s what Andrew Turley did with the TUIO protocol. So, Apple won’t allow an app that does the trick? Why not go back to what developers did before the SDK, and just use the iPhone browser?

As Andrew explains it:

After reading the story I started thinking about seeing how far one could push Safari as an application platform, using web apps to get around Apple’s tight control of the app store. Since you would be connecting to another computer anyway to use an OSC application, why not just have the app be a web app running on a web server somewhere on the local network? The web server can then take care of things like sending out OSC messages or playing music or doing whatever it is people want to do.

To that end I created a little system that implements the TUIO protocol. You use an iPhone to run a web app, which in turn talks to the web server, which in turn sends OSC messages.