Create Digital Music » prototypes

A Vacuum Tube Drum Machine: Eric Barbour, Metasonix at RobotSpeak

Peter Kirn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:09:35 +0000

Drum machines with tubes: from Wurlitzer’s classic SideMan to a new prototype, drum machines can make tubes rock even harder.

What happens when adept sonic inventor Eric Barbour of Metasonix makes a drum machine out of clever circuits and vacuum tubes? Well, in the creator’s words:

“It makes noise … a lot of noise.”

Yes, while MPC and LinnDrum creator Roger Linn works out for himself just what people want from a “workstation” drum machine, Eric is whipping up prototypes that make a racket.

Donald Bell aka Chachi Jones captured the Man of Metasonix at a RobotSpeak demo over the weekend. Eric was there to show off commercially-available products with raunchy names, like the AssBlaster and Wretch Machine. But he also brought along this unique tube-based prototype, which clearly stole the show. See the full Flickr set for more:

Robotspeak Metasonix demo [Chachi Jones @ Flickr]

Here’s another video – that’s Eric’s voice explaining a bit of how this works, with a beautiful view of those tubes.

Now, before you get too excited about this, there’s no word on whether this prototype will ever see the light of day. So, please don’t flood Eric’s email with requests asking for the thing. I have a huge amount of respect for his talent as a designer and, um, with the rest of the bloggers have basically made the guy hate me because we make you want stuff he doesn’t necessarily want to make.

Hmmm… actually, if it means that we might get to buy this drum machine, maybe that’d be worth it. So, you know what? Go ahead. Bug him. I can take some hate. I can always order mine under a pseudonym.

Tubes through History

Vintage vacuum tube drum machine from Donald Bell on Vimeo.

Another interesting twist of Eric’s presentation was the discussion of vintage, tube-based drum machine, as in the Wurtlizer SideMan. This early product, likely the first commercially-available drum machine, was a monster rotary mechanical sequencer, driven by a belt motor, with tube ringing filters to generate the sounds. See the video above, also by Donald, for Eric’s explanation of why it’s best to leave this dinosaur to extinction.

Inside the first commercial drum machine, the Wurlitzer SideMan – which, ironically, weighed about as much as your sideman. Photo: guiltysin.

As impractical as these designs are as hardware, I think it’s actually easier to take them as inspiration for software – with no FCC to worry about, and something quite a lot more portable than a SideMan.

Other tube / mechanical drum machines to share, or historical notes on the SideMan? Share in comments…

OTTO: Beautiful, Original Hardware for Beat Slicing in Circles

Peter Kirn — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:18:32 +0000

Design in music in a digital world can be about the object as the sound – musical ideas translate from one medium to many others. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with a new visual metaphor, a new creation for manipulating music.

OTTO is a functioning prototype combining interactive hardware and computer software, the invention of Luca De Rosso. He produced the design as a thesis project for his masters’ degree in Visual and Multimedia Communications at IUAV University of Venice. It uses the Arduino open source hardware platform and Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP software, and Luca accordingly is quick to credit the assistance of those two communities. In that sense, two, I think it points to lots of new design in the field of integrated hardware and software – not just standalone hardware or standalone software or generic controllers for anything, but hardware that itself behaves like software.

All photos here courtesy Luca and used by permission; see his Flickr account.

OTTO ~ demo.01 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

Luca sends along some more details of the behind-the-scenes workings just for us. (Thanks, mate!)

Luca actually had assistance from his father working on the case. (I love that – father-son collaboration!) All the electronics are on a single Arduino board, and the patch works in Max. (Max has features that make it well worth using, but it’d be nice to see a Pd port, too, making the whole setup open source – and giving you an easy way to run it on Linux.)

OTTO ~ Getting Started from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

Luca sends us a view of the innards of this device – you saw it here first:

The first prototype is done, says Luca, with three more coming in coming days as he heads to a festival in Croatia. Plans for the future: no commercial availability yet, but Luca says he’d be happy to hear from anyone interested in manufacturing. (Capital remains the big challenge, even as fabrication gets easier.)

I also love the way he’s designed the documentation. Music tech industry, please, this is how it should be done – with all due respect and without naming names, we really would love if you just showed us your gear and didn’t have some swarmy dude gushing about lots of hype. In fact, we’d be equally happy to buy your gear if the design spoke for itself rather than having your name and circuit diagrams and random text plastered all over it.

But this is really visually inspiring, creative work. And to top it off, it looks insanely fun to play. Putting the beats in a circle opens up all kinds of other possibilities, and suggests thinking in terms of cycles rather than the grids we see on other hardware. As with the monome, you can imagine other software applications that would hook into this basic, minimal hardware design. I hope we see more of this design and concept.

http://www.lucaderosso.com/otto/otto

Get loopy with the DIY $10 Ableton Footcontroller (no soldering required)

Michael Una — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 05:38:38 +0000

By now you’ve all probably seen that excellent video of Kid Beyond illustrating his usage of Ableton Live. Pretty cool, right? If one had such a system, you could loop yourself playing guitar, beatboxing, etc., all perfectly in sync with programmed drum/MIDI tracks and other performers.

Here’s how to set up your own system in a similar hands-free operation style, for about US$10, without having to solder anything. It’ll take you about an hour once you gather the parts required, or less. No joke.

You will need:

A QWERTY keyboard, preferably with a USB connector. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy an adapter to fit your laptop, which costs extra. You can get one for $7.50 at AllElectronics.com, but you can find them even cheaper at your local thrift store’s “technology pile.” I got mine for $2.

A flathead screwdriver.
Ableton Live. Ed.: Live is a perfect choice here, but you may find this useful with other music apps, as well — or even in a VJ set. -PK

A free keyboard-mapping utility called Autohotkey (if you’re running Windows). If you’re running Mac, the program to use is calledIKey.

That’s it. Here’s how to make it go:

Above: Steps 1-2. Simple enough.

1. You’re going to remove a significant number of the QWERTY keyboard’s keys, leaving only those spaced far enough apart to operate with your foot. Identify which keys you want to keep with a magic marker BEFORE you go hog-wild with the screwdriver, otherwise you’ll lose track of which is which. I ended up with 12 remaining keys, in two rows. Your feet may be smaller or bigger, so experiment with it.

2. Glue some squares of larger, stiff material to the keys to give your foot a bigger target. I used some plastic lenses (20 cents apiece at American Science & Surplus) and hot glue. Epoxy or a plastic welding cement might work better in the long run.

3. Plug the keyboard into your computer and boot up Ableton Live.

4. Download and install either Autohotkey (WIN users) or IKey (Mac).

5. Here’s the almost-tricky part: In Ableton Live, you need to create a new project with six audio tracks. Arm recording on all tracks. Turn off monitoring for all tracks except one.

6. Use the keymappping function (click the “KEY” button in the upper right hand corner of Live’s screen) to assign a keystroke to each track’s “record/play” button. It doesn’t matter which keystrokes you assign, because we’re going to be remapping them anyways. For this example, the keys I used were !,@,d,h,k, l.

7. Create a new script with Autohotkey and enter something similar to what’s pictured below. The 12 keys left on your QWERTY should be put at the start of each line. The idea is that as each key is depressed, Autohotkey remaps those into a sequence of keystrokes.

I chose to have my top row of buttons select the track, delete whatever’s there, and begin recording. The bottom row of buttons hits “play” on the corresponding track, which stops recording and begins looping on the corresponding track. You can re-trigger loops this way also.

Here’s an image of my keymaps in Live and the AutoHotkey script I made. Pretty simple, all things considered. I would be happy to share my blank Ableton set and accompanying AutoHotkey script to any windows users who need a little help getting started.

If you’re running Mac, here’s an idea of what you’ll have to do using IKey. It’s very similar but slightly different. For instance, we permanently glued the shift key down, to skirt some of IKey’s trigger-key rules.

8. Save the script, activate it (you’ll see the AutoHotKey icon appear in your taskbar), and you’re good to go. It’s that easy.

The end result? Not too shabby:

You can hear a track recorded by myself and bandmate Cameron Moore using two MIDI-linked Ableton Live setups here.
Note: Cameron runs Mac and I run Windows, and we had no issues.

Check the forums for a more in-depth discussion, and feel free to ask questions. Also, if you decide to undertake this project, please post your results!

The Mobile Audio Workstation: Trinity Linux Hardware, Now with Free Ardour DAW

Peter Kirn — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:34:14 +0000

For mobile work, your choices have traditionally come down to one of two choices: either lug your laptop and audio interface, or get dedicated recording hardware with far fewer capabilities. We’ve been following the evolution of the Linux-powered Trinity mobile recorder for over a year now because we’re interested in what could happen between those two extremes.

Prototype Trinity recorders initially failed to impress on the software side: the bundled software focused on Audacity 2.0, a fairly basic waveform editor. That already allows far more than what’s possible with dedicated hardware recorders, but maybe not quite enough to warrant leaving your laptop at home. Since we last saw it, though, the Trinity has gotten two major improvements. First, it’s not naked any more; it’s got a lovely, brushed aluminum case. More importantly, though, it’s got an application worth writing home about: a new, mobile/embedded edition of the powerful, free DAW Ardour called Ardourino.

Ardourino isn’t just Ardour running on the Trinity: it’s a special, customized version of the DAW intended for mobile devices. You get the capabilities of Ardour, a full-featured open source DAW that also runs on desktop Mac OS X (natively, no less) and Linux, but adapted to smaller screens. That shows some promise for the open source audio software; I can’t think of any other major pro audio software that’s mobile device ready. And, of course, that also means you can work directly on your desktop DAW on the road, without any import/export of files.

Since the Trinity is running Linux, other applications are possible, too; one prototype photo already shows it running the Hydrogen drum machine.

For many readers, the Trinity rightfully has competition from laptops; you may just not want another device. Nonetheless, though, the Trinity provides an interesting glimpse at what the future of mobile/embedded audio devices might look like, and some of the potential of Linux for music and audio. As far as the Trinity itself, we look forward to learning more about the finished project.

Ronald Stewart’s Blog on the Trinity (and other Linux audio musings)

Previously:
Linux-Powered Mobile Trinity DAW in the Wild
Portable, Linux-Based Trinity Recorder Development Continues; New Specs

Interactive Table as Synth, Via New, Better Bjork Tour Vids; Microsoft Surface Snickering

Peter Kirn — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:13:08 +0000

There’s a simple problem: sound is invisible, and sound synthesis concepts don’t have any physical reality. Knobs, faders, patch cords, keyboards, infrared sensors, touchpads, and the like all work quite nicely for synthesizing sounds. But take a closer look at Bjork’s use of the reacTable, an interactive multimedia interface that uses a camera to track the movements of blocks on a surface. They really are using it to make sounds, those sounds really are visualized in a nice new way (watch the waveforms connecting the blocks), and while the result is some swoopy synthy sounds, the interface does make making them a lot of fun.

It helps that Bjork pulls out some of her synthiest, electronicilicious-est tracks, like Pluto:

and Hyperballad:

And, of course, part of what happens is that the computer screen here has become the interface. When it works — when the visuals match the sounds, and suggest some new ways of constructing music — it really does show potential for this kind of instrument. (Even if you don’t buy into the blocks, the way the visualization itself works has a lot of promise.)

That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s Surface, too … but sometimes the gimmick can be a solution in search of a problem. Well, actually, maybe your computer of the future really will be “a big-ass table.” (Thanks, SarcasticGamer.com, for making me laugh so heartily.)

Microsoft Unveils Surface, Multi-Touch Digital Table, But Why Not Make Your Own?

Peter Kirn — Wed, 30 May 2007 13:43:52 +0000

The good news: Microsoft is taking multi-touch, camera tracking, and gestural technologies seriously, and they have what looks like a very nice implementation that will be one of the first commercial implementations. The bad news: it’ll cost US$10,000 out of the gate. That high price will mean you’ll see at places like T-Mobile stores and Sheraton hotel lobbies first. But what you need to know: you can build your own version, thanks to available open source tools, with is likely to be more useful for music.

Good sources of commentary:
New Media Initiatives Blog at Walker Arts Center, which notes this could be museum-friendly tech.

Chris O’Shea @ Pixelsumo, who has built a device something like this himself.

The video does show what’s cool about Surface — and it’s easy to imagine these same techniques being applied to live visual and music performance. (People have already tried experiments in that, and I think there’s a lot more to be done — once you’re talking music rather than just digital snapshots, you get into deeper questions about how to model the interface.)

But let’s get a few things out of the way:
1. Enough about Minority Report, already! Minority Report was a terrific movie from an interface design perspective. (Slightly less so from a … well, movie perspective, but that’s another story.) But this has nothing to do with Minority Report’s free-form, table-free, gestures in 3D space with gloves interface, unless all vaguely futuristic interfaces will now be compared to that movie. Actually, this thing is more practical, unless you want to share gloves with people at the Sheraton. (Ewwww … oh, and incidentally, there’s no logical reason why in the future we need gloves to do tracking.)

How about other comparisons? My apartment looks kinda like Blade Runner. This ATM is exactly like Lost in Space. If I start selling giant rubber costumes with fins, I can be the first to bring commercially-viable Doctor Who monster technology to a mainstream public. Oh, never mind.

2. “First commercial implementation” is sometimes meaningless. Since the dawn of time, pricey, first-to-market versions have often failed. Look at Apple: Lisa? Newton? Even the Mac initially lost out to the Apple II. That’s just one company. Now, there’s the additional reality of readily-available tools allowing people to take concepts like this and do whatever they want, freely experimenting without market restrictions. The commercial implementations may be more successful in that case — but the independent efforts could be sexier.

3. Tables take up space. Part of the reason you’ll be seeing this in hotel lobbies is that the tracking here presumably requires a large physical object in order to work, much like other interactive tables we’ve seen. If you want gestural or multi-touch technologies to be portable, or work with much smaller computer form factors, you need a different design. I’m still intrigued by what cameras may be able to do with enhanced computing resources.

None of this is intended to criticize Microsoft. I’m personally excited this stuff is catching on. I just want to make sure we remain tethered to the larger realities here.

That said, I’ll be eager to try out the demo version in New York in a couple of weeks, which just happens to coincide with a conference of people interested in musical interface design. Heck, maybe we can convince the Microsoft engineers to come over for a few drinks.

DIY Surface Computing

Be Your Own Bjork: If you want to build your own device like this, the reacTable software is available open source. It’s even available as a library for the free tool Processing, which is an ideal environment in which to learn how to code this stuff. reacTable is a little different from Surface, in that reacTable has objects on the surface to manipulate. That rules out some gestures you might make with your hands, but it does add additional tactile feedback, and, hey, playing with blocks is fun. Actual touch might be more difficult, though other computer vision tools that enable tracking are available.

Chris O’Shea (who comments on today’s announcement on his blog Pixelsumo) had also begun an open source software and hardware project using blocks on tables, called Sonic Forms. That project ultimately didn’t take off, but Chris has gone on to write about, speak publicly about, and do other wonderful things, like a table installation with music boxes.

Of course, my significant other doesn’t live in the world of blogs, and says, wisely, “but would you really want to do that?” That’s not a bad question to answer. It’s worth weighing this against other interface possibilities, and, for that matter, balancing the time you spend on the interface with the time you spend on music. More on both those topics soon.

And yes, obviously whoever shoots photos of these things doesn’t really get this concept. Here’s a hot tip to save you US$10,000:squeeze someone you love right now, huddle next to your computer in front of Google Maps, and you, too, can have “collaborative computing.” (Make sure they point meaningfully at the screen and laugh with delight at … the … directions … to the airport.) Since you can do this with a normal laptop, you don’t have to put a giant, clunky digital table in your living room. Which is good, because those coffee table books might screw up the tracking.

Microsoft Goes Multi-Touch at Midnight; Musicians Might Look Further into Future

Peter Kirn — Wed, 30 May 2007 02:49:38 +0000

Musicians, behind the technological curve? Not when it comes to interface design: we’ve been consistently ahead. Little wonder, as digital musicians look for ways of making digital media more expressive, with centuries of physical interface design in musical instruments to push those demands further.

In other words, Microsoft is up to something, and I look forward to whatever it is, but it’s the long view that will ultimately matter more.

Numerous outlets are reporting that Microsoft is expected to introduce its gestural, multi-touch technology, called PlayTable. I’m not quite sure why the product name sounds ripped off from the ReacTable. But, while I’m interested to see what Microsoft is doing, I’ll give the ReacTable the edge, unless Microsoft open-sources its software, builds a library for Processing, and starts touring with Bjork. (I’ll take Radiohead + PlayTable. No? Not happening?)

I do think, though, that after over two decades of mainstream computer software interfaces using basic pointing devices not far removed from joysticks, multi-touch is pretty inevitable at this point. So the real question here is, can Microsoft deploy the technology, or is this just another prototype? Even Apple’s iPhone uses only the most basic two-fingered gestures, and still says nothing about what Apple might ultimately do with their hardware and OS.

Also, now that multi-touch technology is starting to grow, it’s time for the tech blogs to understand not all the technologies are equivalent. We have multi-touch built into hardware, and multi-touch built into displays. We have display technology that works with embedded hardware (like LCDs), and display technology that requires projection (and thus, lots more space, as with the frustrated total internal reflection system employed by Jeff Han and many of the tables-with-blocks-on-them schemes). We have systems that use touch against undifferentiated surfaces (like the JazzMutant Lemur) and systems that provide tactile feedback (like the blocks). My sense is that what we’re really waiting for is multi-touch as a commodity, not one-product innovations. Look no further than touchpads, displays, mice, laser optics, keyboards, sensors, circuits, microprocessors … you get the idea. From DIY to mass-market products, each of these has depended on basic hardware building blocks that can be had on the cheap.

One good piece of news, though: the more these technologies proliferate, the less likely a single company will be able to control patents on the general techniques — hardware specifics, yes, but not generalities. And the more likely hardware will become available to the rest of us to use.

In fact, if we got something useful from Microsoft, it’d be operating system-level multi-touch intelligence more than hardware. That would give others a platform on which to build a variety of hardware, which might finally break up the rigidity of computer design (Mac and PC alike) that has reigned effectively since the Apple II.

If you think about the current restrictions of music software, a lot of them have to do with the pointing interface. Heck, some musicians like QWERTY keyboards so much, they build them into instruments. The problem remains pointing. So, nothing against the mouse, but if multi-touch really does go mainstream, the possibilities for music software look good indeed.

That may be quite a few midnights, though. Let’s sleep on it.

Pacemaker: 120GB Pocket DJ MP3 Player

Peter Kirn — Mon, 07 May 2007 13:00:36 +0000

We’ve seen DJ parties with iPods and now handheld remote controls for DJ software. But what about building mixing features into the portable player itself? That’s the idea of the Pacemaker, a new portable player promised for Fall.

Pacemaker site (Warning: auto-plays music)
Tonium, the mysterious manufacturers’ site

DJ features and mixing are internal to the player, and there’s rich playback support in general. You can cross-fade on the unit itself, and add effects, with dedicated headphone and line out jacks and cueing features. There’s a multi-function touch control for all these features. As a player, it looks great on paper, with a 120 GB hard drive and support for OGG, FLAC, and AAC in addition to the usual MP3, WMA, and WAV. (Apparently no line recording, which would really make this a must-have, but some of the specs are still unclear.) If they don’t botch the design somehow, I can see this appealing to electronic musicians as much as DJs.

Line out and headphones crossfaders

Pitch bend, cue, loop

EQ, sound effects

Dedicated headphones and line out jacks

USB 2.0

120 GB hard drive

Sound to noise ratio of > 100 dB

MP3 with Variable Bit Rate, AAC, WMA, WMA lossless, OGG, FLAG, WAV

13 ms input latency

18-hour battery life; 5 hours in DJ mode

Mac and PC compatible (assuming they just make it a USB Mass Storage device)

Save mixes

We haven’t seen the first product yet, but they’re promising more — “a pallet of innovative products and digital services … Everyone can be the DJ!” Not everyone can be product designers and manufacturers, though, so a lot (build quality, effects quality, usability, actually shipping) depends on the shipping product.

This isn’t the first time manufacturers have talked about creating an “iPod killer for DJs.” A research team at HP had the unusual idea of building a player around a ring, with motion sensors scratching tracks and streaming to other devices for collaboration. Those ideas don’t sound so far-fetched any more, with the Wii popularizing motion control and the Zune popular– uh, implementing wireless sharing. Wearing a music player as a ring still sounds silly, though, and like many research projects, nothing came of HP’s DJammer.

Thanks to Oscar and Louis and Jaan for sending this in!

FRONT: Prototype Knob-Slider Musical Interface

Peter Kirn — Wed, 02 May 2007 18:44:29 +0000

Vienna-based design firm GP designpartners sponsored the FRONT musical interface design as part of its annual student thesis project. We’ve certainly heard these promises before for alternative interfaces: “a really new music instrument — without using classical paradigms. an instrument for new sounds, that gives the musician the possibility to express himself — even live at stage. with great expectation we are awaiting the jimmy hendrix of the 2010s.”

The design itself has simplicity going for it, certainly — but it may not live up to its radical promise. Basically, it’s a twistable knob, with touch-sensitive capacitance, in a slot (for use as a fader), connected via USB. There’s also a tack-on panel that you can bend up and down, for control of another parameter. Then there are lots of fiddly flaps and connectors and such which allow for right-handed or left-handed use, plus a belt clip that makes the FRONT into a FRONT-tar.

The result certainly looks beautiful, regardless, and I do appreciate the thought and restraint that went into the design. It looks stunning as a student product. Of course, wanting to play it is something else entirely. I mostly wonder how one would set the tension of the fader/slider element.

FRONT Project Page at GP designpartners
Via Electronic Music Interface, an interesting blog reflecting on new interface design.

I always enjoy new instrument designs, whether you might consider them successful or not. But I wonder if a better exercise for students, before they embark on trying to invent a new interface (though that is a worthy endeavor), would be to find some existing interface and make that work for music — ideally something mundane, that seems at first unsuited to the job. It seems that part of what’s essential about the musical performance impulse is not finding objects that work, but finding objects that don’t. Dedicated musicians sing in the shower, badly and out of tune, through blown-out cords, prod gadgets and instruments incessantly even as they sound awful, and drum desks and pant legs until they annoy their significant others. Do we, as the site suggests, “need new musical instruments badly?” Or do we really just need new music and new musicians? Discuss.

Inside Details on the Linux-based Trinity Audio Recorder

Peter Kirn — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 21:59:57 +0000

Roland Stewart of Trinity Audio Devices writes in to clear up a number of the questions we had about their upcoming portable Linux-based audio recorder. While the device is a bit pricey, with a list expected at US$999, it will certainly do things other devices can’t: it’s a full-blown computer, but without the power consumption problems usually associated with that, and it’s price-competitive with some of the higher-end hard disk recorders, but with the ability to run any Linux software you want. That last point is where some of the more interesting details emerge. I’m not sure it’ll make me give up my laptop, since I care about having a full-sized screen and keyboard and having the horsepower to run soft synths, but if you’re looking to invest in a field recorder and want computer-style editing, this will be one worth watching as it evolves, especially as a Linux-based rival to new ultra-portable Windows PCs. (And yes, I do agree, laptops are overly bulky to work as field recorders.)

Roland writes:

On the design concept and specs: My roots as an audio engineer and remixer are based on Mac and Pro Tools since 1990. The desire and vision to ‘roll out’ a Pro appliance in Linux was only motivated by constant claims that Linux doesn’t stack up to Windows and Mac. I really just wanted to create something to contribute to the advancement of Linux audio as a Pro solution. I’m over Pro Tools and big bulky solutions. The project itself is in the 16th month of development. We quickly prototyped an X86 version, but right away there were way too many power and power management issues. I noticed that UMPC is experiencing those issues now. [Ed.: Other readers could probably comment more on the UMPC, but my sense was that this wasn't the last word in Intel's lower-power platform, that the hardware may remain a work in progress. Then again, Intel has stiff competition in the small devices space, so it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. -PK]

So basically we have spent a year perfecting and polishing our ARM9 [processor] solution. Granted, better website info and photos of the unit would be helpful, but we are limited by delivery times and schedules of our vendors. The next preview of the device will be the ‘retail version’ prototype.

When deciding what would be Trinity’s’ core, I had to decide what minimal features and components do I need to produce or remix a track of professional quality. I am confident that it can be done with what Trinity provides. Now I don’t expect someone to produce the soundtrack for the next Spiderman movie on Trinity but you could certainly sample your source audio for it quite well.

On the input device: Somehow Henry at Linuxdevices wrote that Trinity has a touchscreen; it doesn’t. We tested the touchscreen and touch just has too many drawbacks and we didn’t want to tote the touchscreen baggage. We figured we would have enough issues as a ‘come out of nowhere new product’ to load up on touch issues. Also, in order for the Compulab SoM to interface with our base board Codec you have to remove the AC97 codec on the SoM. When you do that you lose touch capabilities entirely.

We literally dabbled with a few solutions including the ‘Q’ click wheel and others. The biggest drawback here is we felt the
safest ease of use was to make sure the HID acted like an extension of your hand. Synaptics provided us with their roundpad touchpad which acts exactly like the touchpad on a laptop. Ed: This decision makes sense to me. Synaptics makes fantastic touchpads for many of the PC laptop makers — and Apple, incidentally — so this may be more reliable than relying on a touchpad.

On Software: Peter, I gotta tell you, the new features in Audacity 1.3 make the app pretty good. Colapsing tracks and the ability to shift/slip tracks are a real improvement. Currently we are running Debian [Linux distro], with XWindows (tiny x) and Blackbox desktop. We want to deliver an appliance running audio apps with a desktop. Blackbox is minimal, but I would like to see KDE by the time we ship. About Transmission (our audio app) I really think when we have this running on Trinity, then we will make some heads turn… but that will take some more time to complete.

Computer I/O [In addition to the audio I/O] The unit has 2 available USB ports one slave and one host. You can plug
it into your PC and the PC will see Trinity as a hard drive so you can transfer audio or sessions over. The other USB port allows for any type of USB music instrument. I noticed all of these USB-based turntables and mixers are coming out.

Definitely some interesting details in there. The most important point to me is the ability to run your own software under Debian Linux. I’m actually surprised Roland wants to replace the Blackbox windowing interface with something like KDE, as I’d personally rather have something simpler and more lightweight. But because this is Linux, and because Roland says he will encourage people to customize, there are broad possibilities for what people could do with this device.

Audacity 1.3 also does sound promising; part of the reason the current Audacity is in such poor shape and has lacked updates so long is that the development community have been focused on 1.3 for some time. I think we’ll really see whether this device is useful when we see what custom software Roland has in store for it.

We won’t know for sure until this ships and is a real product, but it’s interesting enough to keep an eye on it, so stay tuned.