How To Use Renoise As "Master Pc Keyboard" Across Other Softwa

Hi, I really love the (almost) 2,5 octave pckeyboard Renoise offers us, and I often use it to play midinotes into other software such as Live or Logic. I was just wondering if there’s any way to “force keyboard focus” to stay on Pattern Editor, even if you’re clicking around a different software altogether? (OSX)

I have not heard of any OS that forces keyboard direction towards one application when having another forward. That would require specific software but i’m not aware of such software on the Mac. On Windows perhaps someone may want to try AutoIT3, but on Windows there is DirectInput that has to be cracked which is doubtful as well.

ReViSiT is able to catch it on Windows, but I’m wondering if there’s a OSX solution… That 2,5 octave keyboard… :)

Search around for “virtual midi keyboard” or “virtual midi piano”, etc. There’s quite a few different choices out there, all with varying degrees of quality and usefulness.

Here’s a pretty nice one I stumbled onto, which supports Windows, Mac and Linux:

It doesn’t offer exactly the same layout as Renoise with the default settings, but there is a Keyboard Map editor built in, and if you go into the Preferences and look at the “raw keyboard map” option, you’ll see that can actually load your own custom .XML keyboard mappings if you want to get really low level. So even though the default map doesn’t cover all the same keys as Renoise, it should hopefully quite simple to make your own custom map which does. Another nice thing is that the program can be made to stay “Always on top”.

On Windows you will need to route this software into Renoise via something like MIDI Yoke.

I’m not too familiar with exactly how you’d do the same thing on the Mac, but I’m reading that it’s possible to create extra ports natively in OS X using IAC. According to a post on the Ableton Live forum, you should go to: /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup > MIDI Devices tab > IAC driver.

Hope this helps! :)

Possibly an even better solution (???) :

lsmi-keyhack, a program that allows you to use a second keyboard solely for generating MIDI signals. I’m planning on setting this up soon on my Ubuntu rig with a second keyboard with all the unnecessary keycaps removed :)

The only possible problem is that I’m not sure if this can be compiled for OSX. I know virtually nothing about mac… But it uses the BSD kernel now, right, so you may be able to compile it?

Good luck!

Bidule could be another solution.
It will allow you to send MIDI information from your QWERTY keyboard (as Renoise sort of does), but will let you send the MIDI to any program on your computer even if it’s in the background (like Renoise often is for me). Bidule can be in the background while you’re using the keyboard too.