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Design Your Own Audio Controller
pronobozo writes with a link to "a cool interface called LEMUR for controlling audio applications. 'LEMUR is a handy and modular touchpanel based controller designed for audio and multimedia real-time applications. Our technology associates multitouch capabilities with visual display. LEMUR is provided with an extensible library of User Interface Objects such as faders, switchs, pads, keyboards, strings, etc.'" It's also vaporware at this point, but looks cool enough I hope it really reaches the market early next year as the site promises.
I think they are entirely marketing this in to narrow a makret. Yes, it seems like it would be great to control audio apps, but there is a much greater potential. Many large control boards could be easily replaced with a small dynamic board that gives you the pots/switches/etc. that you need at the time.
I'm thinking, in particular, things liking theatrical light and sound boards in which you use most of the sliders very rarely - but its still important that you have the option to input them through a slider or nob (as opposed to entering a number).
I bet there are other applications in industries where large control boards are involved where this could be useful as well.
In theory, there isn't such a limitation. However, we suggest you not to use more than ten fingers at once, since our sensor hasn't been experimented yet by 11 fingers beta testers.
And you, madam, are very ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.
Though it looks like it could be very useful for certain types of virtual controls (particularly x/y axis controllers as well as sliders), its usefulness is slightly limited by its lack of velocity and pressure (other than boolean, anyway) sensitivity. Requiring PC host software seems more of a handicap than a feature, too...
Still, anything to break away from having to use a mouse to tweak realtime parameters on-screen is welcome.
"How does this affect the LEMUR's ability to interface with application such as Cakewalk's SONAR?"
It practically eliminates that compatability. While OSC is an open protocol, and even though there are quite a few products listed (including a bunch of open source items), it is pretty much a Reaktor thing. Don't get me wrong, Reaktor is very, very cool. But if you wanted to use it with ProTools or Cubase or Logic or FLSTudio or Magix or Cakewalk, you would probably have to setup some sort of OSC proxy that sits on the OSC bus and outputs MIDI.
I cannot fault them for taking this approach -- there are some limitations with MIDI, with some ugly workarounds and some pretty bad scalability issues. Imagine if you were epxected to run Kermit over Ethernet instead of TCP/IP, I think that's a fairly good analogy.
I suppose you could extend something like MIDI-OX to implement OSC, and cause it to route the messages you were interested in onto the midi bus.
I have no doubt at all you could make Reaktor do exactly that, sit on the OSC bus and pass some of the messages through, filtered for your various midi devices.
If the Lemur becomes popular, the support will follow. Wake me up when I can buy on on Zzounds. Meanwhile I'll continue building my ucapps.de midibox, using my Peavey PC-1600's and my FCB-1010. Right now my rig has seven instruments and 4 controllers, and while MIDI is frustrating, I have not reached its limitations.
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