…more details to come.

(check the comments, I’m posting updates down there)

Touch Arc is a Monome Arc emulator for development purposes. It is very much not intended to be “nice” to use or a competitor to the hardware, so please don’t complain about that aspect (if you want a useable and ergonomic interface that’s a joy to use, buy an Arc).

Touch Arc comprises two parts, a TouchOSC template and a Max patch that works as the middle ware and converts the Arc OSC your app is transmitting into a format the touchosc template can interpret, and vica versa it takes the touchosc template interface input and converts it into fake Arc OSC format that your app can handle.

This way developers can work on proof of concept, sound in the knowledge that once the arc hardware is released their applications will function.

The touchOSC template initially replicates all the in and out points of the Arc 2 (I’ll do an Arc 4 one later if there is a demand).

This means there are two duplicated UI’s for each encoder, these are made up of:

- 64 slider ui elements, which can handle values of 0 – 15 (these are the LED’s)
- 4 momentary buttons, that output every 100ms either -2, -1, +1, +2 (these are the encoder turns).
- 1 momentary button that registers as an encoder press event.

For the LED side of things, due to the limitations in the TouchOSC interface, the LED UI is made up of 4 multisliders each made up of 16 subsliders. We could have used 64 single sliders, but they can’t go narrow enough to get 64 of them in a row, even in landscape mode, this means the LED handling middleware needs to do a fair amount of math converting 0-64 into 0-3 + 0-15 coordinates. For this reason (and mainly due to hitting a brick wall with the range wrapping round at 64, I used Javascript as the main math function handling.

The interaction conversion side of things is a much easier straight translation, so I handled that with just Max. The encoder rotation interface is faked by firing a value every 100ms for as long as one of the valued buttons is pressed in the UI. I could replace these with a slider the more you slide it from the center the faster it fires the +1 or -1 values, but i figured for ease and simplicity this approach worked.

Source code is available on google projects, so you can download it and try it out http://code.google.com/p/touch-arc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk. If you can find bugs or better ways of approaching the problem, I’m very happy to update the code, or please feel free to use SVN and update the code or post other examples directly to the project.

I have spoken to Brian at Monome and he’s very happy for me to make this available, if it makes developers lives a little easier pre launch, hopefully that will be of benefit to everyone.

Update:

I’m working on a native Max UI, to see if that renders better without so many hicups. It could also be used in app patches where you’d like an onscreen representation of the Arc UI. Should be ready for testing very soon.

Quick test patch, to see how we can control the ES-1 module from Expert Sleepers using Max/MSP.

Usually the ES-1 is controlled by Silent Way (which has a ton of awesome functionality; calibration, quantizations, LFO’s etc. But i really wanted a way that I could quickly get up to my neck in craziness using max/msp to control the ES1, so this is my first quick test.

Is it just me or does it seem exponential the sound (and Hz increase on the toptop z3000) as you slide the amplitude slider to the right?

More coming soon…

Patch Attached Below:

----------begin_max5_patcher----------
657.3oc0W0ziaBCD8L4WgkOVklZa9HPus8P+CziUqpHfSVWA1Tvnlrq17auF
CjjskDbBDz1KfX.m48dya737xLK3JwVZAD7Yv2AVVuLyxRGpJfUyyVvzvsQI
gE5OCReNNLZObd8q3koLdBUpeG4XPQorMJpIZVnL5IFeyOxoQx5LZ6u.MGPr
WVcyws8J3wlkvh0oTr5meD6Aqh85rYUWlaHXiDooTtrEsR5VclgeSTxiAB9m
DqW2IUvMAWK3xB1yTcLxBzUyPMoHXb0MrKR+D5LTzEdRV4go5rBeHmElLlj+
gzrDlrLldWYNwknIqmALe4zP7ulS+UIkGs69VxqM0tFva6wk2JHthlObxQNO
4bH0DxKn5VGrq9mQtKiVu.HqpP.fqB4afc55cFWQnHRjQuk8mVUttUY7sOuB
fQZpais0bO3Xmcmry9l3PBKtmB4a4.9B1QcCnSPckRCZa6KUv5tJQNTkRDgR
0hxJkml4CRGBojhaw7R+sJQ+SOaNnpq8KcpEnqwTeAIB6oG.Enu5h62S2sDg
+uqaF6p2qBW6QFktYzHKBc6JJXa1ObkA2ux3421vzmxnfDWwwtDkfwUSTcfJ
dbWMFj.2S5HLvWn2U3hNC+IwX7g8.7E26enFCR63cGswfrvc.FCuQdzW+iMR
KSzDQg3qdRRyI5F5nDWCmjfG2AIQ6hRn6UlYzc0efcVVehes7Tu8wM6OHl4O
zKElv3+8+jSiup3uUtJDk4Qsou8LXfiPLlVHY7PISvO8iTmVEfO7QOwhio7S
GCmxhyDpADMf.7XmEOSwjmoPBMYPp5PP8iIzjho.CfDYZUIjAPJXZgD98Wgy
2.H4MocbtFfH+IUiHFpQn2W6JMDHod30Y+waXj2r
-----------end_max5_patcher-----------

Having assembled my MidiVox, I set about trying to use it in ableton with sequenced midi control and automation of the CC controls.

I hate dealing with native midi in abelton, the automation is never user friendly with a giant list of everything, and control isn’t exposed in the UI, so the only place to change the values is in the envelope part of the workflow. So I thought I’d delve into Max4Live and make a nice simple front end midi controller that can be added in front of the external instrument and contains all the default Live dials and is specific to MidiVox.

Attached is a zip that contains this first pass as an ableton instrument, as an ableton instrument rack including the external instrument and as the plain max patch. I have no idea if it will work on other peoples systems, as this is my first patch shared, let me know if you can get it working, or if there are issues. I have a ton of ideas for making it better, but for now it works and serves the purpose.

midvox_for_Max4Live.zip (0.1 release)

thresh_hold_toggle.maxpat

I needed this functionality for one of my arduino midi projects that’s on my to do list, this was a quick 15 minute blast through. I’m sure the max isn’t awesome and probably very ugly, but it works.