LiveControl for the iPad/iPod from ST8 on Vimeo.
It’s fun watching projects progress. Since we covered control of Ableton Live with the iPad – noting a few of the early wrinkles in the setup – we’ve gotten new reports as people work out more efficient systems. And incidentally, if you don’t own an iPad, or like handheld-sized control (especially if you prefer to reserve space for a full-sized tactile controller with actual physical controls), a lot of this works on iPhone / iPod touch, too.
I’m also curious to watch how people specify OSC messages for Live, as it could be possible to begin to evolve OSC messaging that works across platforms, to describe more generically the sorts of things people want to control and make a truly open protocol.
LiveControl (TouchOSC Edition) is an open-source, Python-based project for working with live control of Ableton Live. Yes, it’s a bit fiddly now, but I’d view this as something in development – it may be mostly hacker-friendly early on, but could be ready for a wider audience as it evolves. It’s already also very cool – check out those layout pages, even for the iPod touch. (It’s a fork of a monome project, which also looks quite nice.) And because it’s built in Python, it could be worth examining for other projects, too.
For an alternative approach to control, see the iPhone + Logic tutorial video after the break.
In other news, chipPad for iPad has gone live on iTunes. This one isn’t getting an iPhone/iPod version – the developer says it probably won’t fit. But this would be way up on my list if I owned an iPad, so do go and grab it and let us know what you think. What’s appealing to me here, too, is that rather than the iPad being just a remote control for a computer, chipPad really attacks the idea of what this form factor could do as a digital performance tool. And that’s very exciting to me – an idea I think could be explored not only on iPad, but on Android, Linux, and Windows touch devices coming out, too. Take a look at the developer site
chipPad for iPad (Live) from earsmack on Vimeo.
Lastly, here’s a different take on using the iPhone / iPad platform as a controller. Noe Ruiz saw the Ryan Noise video last week and it inspired him to do something that, for him, was easier – here using Apple’s Logic in place of Ableton Live. There’s other cool stuff on his site, including his own work on a DJ interface for the iPlatforms.