Ilias Bergstrom has created a tool for mixing Processing sketches live in performance. (Thanks, Bart!) The resulting tool lets you cross-fade between sketches and easily host a series of sketches in a gig. The process is pretty straightforward:
1. Use the included Foetus library with your sketch to prepare it for use (your sketch needs to use the OPENGL renderer, but I generally find that to be the best route, anyway)
2. Initialize your set for use in the code, setting it up to respond to input if desire (which is the whole fun of it, of course)
3. Put all your sketches together in a folder
4. Configure a text INI file to set up your OpenSoundController, so you can control your sets live with OSC-ready hardware and/or software
5. Play your sketches as “synths,” complete with cross-fading!
Put it all together, and you’ve got one bad Mother (watch your mouth!) The first release came out a bit earlier this fall. It comes with the library and some examples built in Max for control. Everything’s GPL v3 open-sourced.
processing-mother @ Google Code
Ilias and Beau Lotto have also written an academic paper on the tool.
Of course, once you start down this road, you could naturally come up with a lot of other potential features – and it’d be really, really nice to have this basic playback capability in a full-blown VJ host, so you could go back to some traditional clip mixing.
I haven’t had much chance to play with this, so anxious to hear feedback.
Do you play live with Processing? How do you do it? We’d love to hear how different people are working.
You can go hear Onar3d’s music on Last.fm. Something else to listen to while you code.
Updated: PC only for now, but a Mac version is in the works. (Could also be nice to test this on Linux…)