I’m a bit curious about the monome, and since I’m currently on Linux my choices for apps are somewhat limited. I understand that some people use it with pd, but I’m no good with trigonometry so I doubt that would work for me. I’m sure my head would explode if I were to make a patch in pd. 
Thus the big question is if anybody is using it with Renoise. What about the 2.5 beta and the monome? The new features should help things a long somewhat I think. Any takers?
Cheers!
well right now the monome is communicating with OSC while renoise is communicating with MIDI, so you would need some kind of middleware (ie a PD patch for exemple). But maybe this will change with Renoise 2.6 …
i use it with renoise. right now, i get some cool midi generating app for the monome (balron, arpshift, tintinabulome, etc) set the midi chanel as an in instrument in renoise and record lots of cool sequences into renoise for further editing.
i’m having trouble syncing the max apps to renoise as master but it seems to work well enough the other way around (the max app as midi master).
a user here JBL also has other plans afoot…
can you run max apps on linux? if you can and there is a midiyoke equivalent you should be fine…
No, there’s no maxMSP on linux, the equivalent is PureData. (“PD” as above)
there’s a few pd apps alright. look in the monome forum…
i develop a few tools for the monome on linux: libmonome, which replaces serial-pyio and monomeserial, and rove, which is an mlr-like sample cutter. development has unfortunately slowed down significantly due to life in general, but i still work on them when i find time to.
i’m looking forward to 2.6 and the possibilities it will bring.
It wouldn’t be hard at all to use puredata and make a patcher that will allow a customized use of the monome with renoise.
Basically you want:
Monome OSC-in goes in puredata.
Puredata trims, routes, converts the OSC messages into a number… You could do like I did and have the monome directly control Renoise’s pattern matrix…
Once you control something in pure data with your monome, you can have it talk back to the monome so it lights up.
Then you take this data and you want to convert it to midi messages to send from puredata to Renoise… you’ll need midi yoke or something similar to do so.
You set Renoise’s midi in to receive messages from PureData and NOT from the monome.
I’ve got an arduinome and I use it under linux (unbutu studio 9.10). I use a beta of serial-pyo beta as OSC API.
http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=app:serial-pyio
I’m learning Puredata to make my own application. You can use axiome from gwen, but it’s a bit buggy with the pop-up window when you try to select your samples.
http://post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=2274&page=1#Item_0
You will find at the end of the topic my version to resolve this issue… it’s not really good but it works.
Well with Renoise I’ve made a patch which use the jack transport abstraction, so theorically you will be able to control Renoise through pd, using jack and midi. But it needs a great amount of work to make cool patch working efficiently for your own need and I’m pretty lazy…
If you send me this patch, I’ll give puredata a try. I’m sure I can learn it and help you with the patcher since I already done this kind of work in max/msp.
Wow, that’s a lot of response guys, this is very exciting and uplifting input. I tried futzing about with puredata once before, but had to give up on it because I couldn’t find any documentation that talked to me on my level. Miller Puckette’s book was way too math based for me, even if it’s considered the best documentation for pd. But I just found two other pd books for beginners,so I’m going to give it another go. I’m going to look at “Programming Electronic Music in Pd” & “Floss Manuals PureData” in case anyone is interested. The latter has instructions for installing and setting up, both the first one looks a bit more advanced. I guess both are good places to start in order to get my feet wet and see if all of this is doable for me. Thank you for your all your replies. 
However, what you are looking for is midi communication.
If you want to use a monome with renoise via PD, the sounds come from renoise… so it’s all about midi communication.
Good luck with that.
I’m still considering giving it a try and thanks for these 3 resources they might be very helpful.
Right, OSC from the Monome to pd, MIDI from pd to Renoise. Got it.
I’ve heard some rumors that Renoise 2.6 will have OSC support, but I’m guessing the need for pd apps will still be there. After all, the Monome is all about controlling MAX/MSP and might be rather boring if used vanilla-style.
I’m actually considering starting out with something cheaper as a controller for pd/renoise. Maybe a DIY project based on the UMC32 or the U-HID, but I don’t know. It should be half the price of a Monome with twice the amount of controls, while being equally flexible. The UMC-32 looks particularly easy to build with, but getting the lights to work properly might not be so straightforward. We’ll see, first I’ll need to play with pd so I know what I’ve got to work with.
By the way, here’s the link to pd’s official manual in case you prefer that to the tutorials/books.
Cheers!
Let me rephrase this because you are absolutely right.
a monome directly controlling the pattern matrix means you have 64, 128 or 256 mute/unmute buttons. The advantages of using max/msp or pd is that you can keep a some of these on/off buttons to create additional uses for your other on/off buttons… one of them could turn the monome into a series of sliders… a few others could load different presets to load in the pattern matrix… etc…
Let me one year please, maybe I’m dumb or I dont have too much time, because it’s not totally functional. By the way, I encourage people to use pd, it’s free… And in a near future we could easily share our works!
PD works wonders with wacom tablets also. i think i’ve had more fun with it than my homebrew monome kit to be honest!