Portable Hardware Groovebox Tracker

Amazing news!

The UI scaling is my biggest concern for portable Renoise DIY projects.

I’m paying close attention to this. Keep us updated if possible. Btw glad you’re considering open sourcing.

Opensourcing was the plan. I’m kind of tired of all the gear companies tone-deafness when it comes to pricing, lack of repairability by the end user, and general lack of features that justify prices which could just buy you a decent refurbished macbook, ya know? (I’m calling out YA’LL over at Ableton with Push 3s pricing and specs and use of linux w/o making any meaningful contributions back to the linux kernel/project generally)

Aaaaanddd since it’s linux based and could be used for hosting other opensource software it wouldn’t be ethical to keep it closed IMHO.

@untilde TY for the wakeup call this morning lol. Made my day :joy: :smiling_face_with_tear:

2 Likes

Alright. This whole project just metamorphosized yet again. So to help with the seemingly endless decision fatigue I always seem to rack up with I’m going to do a series of polls. I’ve been messing about with FSRs (for sensitive resistors) like those found in MPCs ableton push ect and hacked together a 4x4 matrix of them for testing. It could be a viable alternative for the keyboard allowing for expressive midi overdub while not detracting from the standard Renoise qwerty keyboard workflow.

Next I’ve had a real bear of a time trying to dial in the cursor input. Specifically getting the trackpad to work properly with they keyboard firmware (QMK… iykyk). This endevour started after several people expressed a dislike for touch screens on their music hardware. I tend to agree with this sentiment. Ya’ll, your ‘input’ pun very intended regarding your preference would be greatly appreciated on the following:

Starting with the keyboard:

  • Mechanical Keyboard for input with per key LED (Normal typing Layer, MIDI keyboard layer, and MIDI CC layer)
  • Pressure Sensitive Silicon Pad Keyboard with per pad LED (Normal typing layer, MIDI keyboard layer, and MIDI CC layer)
0 voters

and cursor input/control:

  • A circular track pad with outer edge clockwise/counter-clockwise scrolling
  • A hall-effect joystick and rotary encoder for mouse movement and scrolling
  • A trackball (using opaque glass marbles for ultimate color customization)
  • Just a touchscreen for UI movement/control
0 voters

Lastly for those who are Linux users… Scaling. Even with the update I seem to be encountering weird scaling behavior running Renoise either with a desktop environment or when launching Renoise from a TTY using the ‘startx’ command with no desktop environment installed. I’ve tried most of the documented methods for fixing this. Halp pls

oh and the juiciest thing yet… I’m testing USB multichannel audio. Apparently its a kernel module that can be implemented in custom Linux kernels. It would be pretty sick to be able to just plug the thing in and record right into a computer for mixdowns and such or live overdubbing.

3 Likes

This puts a Polyend to shame.

1 Like

@hinick what exactly is going wrong with the UI scaling here?