Despite its quirks, Windows can be a wildly underrated OS for music. Of course, that has little to do with the way it works out of the box. It’s a matter of tweaking your setup so you reshape it into a finely-tuned musical tool. And I believe in sharing that info, because ultimately you should be able to make music on whichever OS you choose.

Rain Recording, a custom PC vendor that specializes in building systems for music and creative work, asked me to write up some of my favorite tools for just that job. For the first part, I looked at the unpleasant stuff — tools for troubleshooting your system and keeping it operating at maximum efficiency.

Part 2 is more fun — the goodies that actually help your musical workflow. I kept this entirely to utilities for MIDI and control, but thanks to the effort of some passionate musician-programmers, that winds up being an impressive toolkit. Quite a few items are Windows-only. (I do actually intend to cover Mac OS and Linux, too, but Windows stacked up pretty well.)

My picks, all free, donationware (and do donate and support these tools!), or relatively cheap:

1. MIDI-OX: This is usually the first utility I install on any PC — it’s a do-everything MIDI monitor and MIDI-processing utility, for watching messages, troubleshooting, and performing various processing tasks. Donationware.

2. MIDI-Yoke: Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have built-in inter-app communication between apps using MIDI, but MIDI-Yoke performs the task elegantly. (Note, Processing lovers: it also works with Java, so this can allow you to build wild interfaces for music in Processing that control other apps.) Donationware.

3. Bome MIDI Translator: A fantastic tool for creating custom MIDI mappings, translating MIDI to QWERTY keystrokes (and back again), and building rules for performance. Prices range from free to EUR59 for end-user releases, but this is one spending money on.

4. SendSX from Bome sends System Exclusive data. Free.

5. Bome’s Mouse Keyboard gives you an on-screen, clickable interface for controlling synths — essential for when you’re doing some last-minute synth programming and set editing on the go. (Yes, like if you decide to make a last-second tweak in the hotel room before a gig.) Free.

6. Edrum Monitor This tool is useful enough for drums alone, with powerful features for adapting input from electronic drum kits and drum sensors for better accuracy. But they didn’t stop there: with deep data monitoring tools, visual meters for calibration, and support for keyboard, mouse, and joystick inputs, this is just an insane do-everything tool that deserves its own category. Donationware.

7. Jack for Windows An inter-app or even inter-computer audio server, ported from Linux. Linux does Jack better, but if you can’t bear to part with your Windows software, it’s worth testing this – and hopefully someone can help the talented Jack team support and develop it further on the Windows OS. Free.

8. Wormhole2: Think Portal for your host of choice: insert this VST plug-in, and you can route audio to and from different apps, different PCs, or even between Macs and PCs easily. Finally, you can bridge the platform divide and the Mac can lie down with the Windows PC happily. This began as commercial software from Plasq, but it’s now free and open source.

9. MCmu: Emulate Mackie Control with devices that don’t support it. Make devices that do support Mackie Control better. Get the controller power you need with apps like Ableton Live and SONAR. Brilliant stuff. EUR39.

10. OSCGlue: Broadcast OpenSoundControl messages from within a host, ideal for gluing together music software and live visuals. Free, from the vvvv community.

11. WMIDI: Transmit MIDI from Wacom (or other brand) tablet input, complete with tilt and pressure, to turn your graphics tablet into an expressive musical controller. Free.

12. GlovePIE: Somehow I left this out of my original round-up. Take joysticks, gamepads, mice, keyboards, MIDI input devices, Wiimotes, and other devices, output MIDI, keystrokes, and other forms of control (even OSC). It’s my favorite software for control input/output. Requires some scripting, but there are some good sample scripts; hope to post more soon. Free.

Full details and more commentary (plus some additional picks):

Essential Toolkit for Windows – Part 2: (Mostly) Free Musical Utilities for Power Users [Rain Recording Pro]

Previously:
10 Free Non-Musical Windows Software Every Musician Should Use

Of course, this is just a short list of my personal favorites. Any I left out, Windows users?

Hardware is wonderful, but make no mistake about it: many musicians have put the same care and musical love into their software setup as once was limited to tangled guitar pedal rigs. We’ve been watching as intricate computer music studios appear in the CDM Flickr pool.

proem, the gifted electronic musician from Austin, Texas (see Wikipedia, proem’s own site) who regular shares haiku-like reflections in CDM comments, is the latest to post his setup:

• Dual Dell e207 LCD displays
• Windows PC
• FL Studio (aka Fruity Loops), with a custom dashboard for controlling all the hardware and a modded install
• Native Instruments Komplete
• Evolution MK249-c keyboard (Evolution was a UK-based keyboard maker later absorbed by M-Audio)
• M-Audio Trigger Finger
• Wacom Intuos3 6×8 (just picked up the same tablet myself and adore it — mouse, begone!)
• The now-discontinued (sadly) Fingerworks iGesture multi-touch controller. Apple iGuesture any time soon, perhaps? (I’ve heard rumors from a couple of sources that they bought the patents.)
• The not-discontinued Shuttle XPress
• Tablet2MIDI, which translates Wacom graphics tablets to MIDI data for use in performance

Whereas hardware fetishists brag about heavy, costly gear collections, the software setup has more to do with clever configuration and control. (Hey, I’m not saying I don’t drool over, say, some of the live rigs we’ve diagrammed in Keyboard Magazine, but the fact that you can afford and lift a great PC setup is encouraging.)

Custom performance setups are definitely where it’s at. FL Studio has Dashboards, Reason has the Combinator, Logic Studio 8 has the new OnStage, Live has Racks, Reaktor has — well, completely custom interfaces, Max 5 promises new performance interfaces, and Native Instruments has Kore. (Just to name a few; SONAR, Cubase, and DP all have custom dashboards with branding I’m presently forgetting.) The basic idea: build a virtual front-panel so you can get right to music making. I personally think it’s interesting all these applications have moved in this direction, with different implementations / design principles. I hope they all continue to go further.

The Tablet2MIDI part is especially interesting. Tablets have unusually high resolution and sensitivity, making them very expressive controllers once you’ve practiced using them. Also on Windows: WMIDI. If you’re on the Mac instead of Windows, you have an excellent (and slightly more polished/stable) alternative, µ midi controller from Music Unfolding. And naturally, on any OS, you can custom-program or patch a solution with Max, Pd, and so on. But this, combined with all the X/Y control, makes for a beautiful set of tools for controlling sound. I’d love to see it in action, proem!

I’ve finally gotten a better tablet myself, a shiny, new, 6×8 Intuos from Wacom. That’s a good thing, because the cheap 4×5 Wacom I had previously first made me feel like I had somehow disconnected my hand from my brain (a combination of the smaller area, lower resolution, and challenge of using tablets in general), then promptly stopped working altogether. I’ll be trying out the Wacom on Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux, and working on hooking it up to Java and Processing, so stay tuned.

Previously:

Flickr Screen Grabs: Infinite Video Theremin, Odd, Free Musical Interfaces

Soft Flickr Finds: Obscenely Complex Bass Effects on a Single Channel

Use Graphics Tablets for Music: New and Updated Software, Free Tablet Theremin

Windows: Nicholas Fournel writes to tell us he’s just uploaded two new applications for Windows, for free. WMIDI converts tablet input to MIDI, with full support for Z angle and tilt; Theremin takes the next step and turns that into a musical instrument.

Nicholas has a lot of other fun stuff, including apps for painting with sound, granulating, glove using, and touch screen-inating. This is our kind of chap.

Mac: Tablet-to-music apps have a tendency to become vaporware. Not Music Unfolding’s µ midi controller. It appears they’ve updated the interface and features and have even made this a Universal app for Intel Macs. They’ve gone beyond just mapping the tablet input to MIDI: by providing computer keyboard control and lovely visual feedback, they’re really making the tablet into an instrument. Now go use the thing and prove this unusual application could have broader appeal!

The next challenge: make the tablet expressive as an instrument. I was once having lunch with Jon Appleton and talking about his work developing the Synclavier sampler, and he held up a salt shaker and said something to the effect of, as a musician/composer if you spent six months working with this, you would find a way to make it an instrument. Now I just need to re-teach myself to draw.

If you use any of these tools, do let us know how it goes — successes and frustrations alike.

[Updated:]
Loic Kessous stops by in comments to point to previous work with tablets over the past eight years, some of which I’ve mentioned here on CDM before, others I haven’t. Notably, his own site includes audio samples from a vocal synthesizer controlled by graphics tablet, as an example of some of the expressive possibilities of using tablet input.

Matt Wright, as interviewed for Cycling ’74’s site, has done a lot of work with tablets, including mapping tablet input to OSC (see paper with Adrian Freed et al, OSC site. OSC is able to maintain the structure of the data from the tablet at high resolutions, while still supported by apps like Max/MSP, Pd, and Reaktor (among others).

For Max/MSP, see the Max/MSP Wacom object for Mac, or a similar object for Windows.

SuperCollider has built-in Wacom support.

For Pd, see Moonix’s site for Moon Utils, wintablet (Windows-only), or Hans’ HID object for Linux. (There are others, too, I think, so a little Googlin’ / searching of the Pd community sites / experimentation might be in order.)

Have I missed anything?

OS X users intrigued by the possibility of controlling sound with a Wacom graphics tablet, here are more resources for you, helpfully offered by a guest comment:

• Music Unfolding's µMIDI Controller,
  US$15 shareware (which also works with your mouse, if you prefer) works
  with the Wacom tablet, though looks like it hasn't been updated since
  2002.
• Max/MSP Wacom support external for OS X, free
• SuperCollider audio synthesis language for OS 9/X, free; includes Wacom support

Let me know how it goes, if you've got a Wacom handy! (I'll worry about getting one for myself cheap.)