Group items tagged

The first basic idea of the glitch-free playback model (a better, less marketingy name is probably timer-based audio scheduling which is the term I internally use in the PA codebase) is to no longer depend on sound card interrupts to schedule audio but use system timers instead. System timers are far more flexible then the fragment-based sound card timers. They can be reconfigured at any time, and have a granularity that is independant from any buffer metrics of the sound card. The second basic idea is to use playback buffers that are as large as possible, up to a limit of 2s or 5s. The third basic idea is to allow rewriting of the hardware buffer at any time. This allows instant reaction on user-input (i.e. pause/seek requests in your music player, or instant event sounds) although the huge latency imposed by the hardware playback buffer would suggest otherwise.

whenever a news site or blog runs a story about one of these alternative controllers, the naysayers crawl out of the slime and start whining “there’s no way I could ever learn to play that”, “it has too many buttons and it scares me”, “I invested in keyboard lessons and I’m not throwing away all that investment”, etc etc. The simple fact that the Jankó design was MEANT TO BE EASIER TO PLAY….they don’t care. Musicians are so conservative it’s disgusting.

Paul von Janko was born in western Hungary in 1856. He was trained as a mathematician and became a musician and engineer, studying under physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1882, he patented a new form of keyboard layout, designed to allow the player to cover a wider span of notes with each hand and to make all keys equally easy to play. Janko's keyboard drew upon earlier designs by Conrad Henfling (1708), Johann Rohleder (1791) and William Lunn (1843). He used short narrow keys akin to buttons, and stacked them up to form six tiers. The notes were arranged in whole-tone intervals. The first tier, the third and the fifth play a whole-tone scale beginning from C. The secound, fourth and sixth tiers play a whole-tone scale beginning from C#. The shape and fingering of a given scale or chord is the same in any key and the octave span is reduced to 5" as opposed to 6-1/2" on a normal piano. In 1886, RW Kurka incorporated a Janko keyboard into a piano, and Paul von Janko himself demonstrated it in Vienna, playing works by Liszt, Schubert, and Chopin.

Make your own physical sweaty interactive computer music interface • While knowing very little about electronics • And only spending a few dollars. Previous research demonstrated that: • Making your own MIDI interfaces is difficult and expensive. • In fact you have to buy silly programmable EPROMs and shit.

The VMX VJ is the utlimate USB MIDI controller for VJs - 99 fully assignable controllers- Plug & Play Windows XP & MAC OS X, Linux support with USB drivers- 2 jogs and 2 cross fader for live video scratching- 8 tracks with soft touch fader- 20 knobs- 28 switches (loops, play, pause, replay etc ...)- 39 radio buttons (special FX...)- dim. 29x41 cm - same as a 17" laptop - white steel

Thummer™ - a new musical instrument being developed by Thumtronics Inc. of Austin, Texas

This EzKEY combo mouse and keypad might be just what you're looking for if you're on the road, suddenly need to add a long list of numbers, and your laptop doesn't have a keypad. Just flip up the top as you would open your car's trunk, and there you have a keypad to do so quick number crunching. Flip it down, and it works and feels just like any other mouse.

The main part of it contains a list which I have compiled over a number of years of companies that make input devices and technologies. I have done this as part of the research for a book which I am preparing.

The MidiWeb consists of a server/client framework using TCP/IP to connect, receive and send midi data. It allows users to connect unlimited midi devices either locally and/or over the internet and send realtime data to each other. Since MidiWeb uses a simple protocol and MidiWeb client applications are not limited to hardware midi devices. Any language that supports socket connections can be used to develop applications for it including Macromedia Flash. The MidiWeb project is released using the GNU GPL license. Also the MidiWebServer and MidiWebClient are written in Python and will run on most platforms. (e.g. Windows, Mac, Unix)