Renoise-Like Standalone Midi Controller?

I just got a new laptop as a portable alternative to my desktop computer. One of the features I love in Renoise is being able to use the computer keyboard as a MIDI keyboard. Unfortunately, not all of my music programs have this feature such as Reason. Does anyone know of an app for macs that can control MIDI with my computer keyboard?

(if not, I can always use rewire, but it’s such a pain to set up…)

Bidule can do what you want.
It’s free to use while in beta,
but may take a bit of setting up to do use.
Basically, Bidule has something called an HID Extractor which you can use to convert the QWERTY keyboard to MIDI info.
It’s great because it is very flexable - you have complete control over what MIDI info is produced from whatever keys you want to use.
The only hastle is that, unless you use the default note assignments, you have to tell it what keys are to play what notes.
The default layout uses all the computer keys, and so it can be difficult to know what notes are where.
Anyway, if you’re interested I can send you an example patch/layout.

It looks great, but I can’t find that free beta version you mentioned. As far as I know, it cost $75.

an alternate idea could be to open the MIDI properties of a Renoise instrument and set the MIDI out port of the instrument to a virtual MIDI port. As far as I know, MacOs should have a virtual MIDI cable by default, otherwise there should be something similar to MidiYoke for Mac available.

Then, in Reason you should use the same virtual MIDI device as input. Of course, you will need to have Renoise opened in the foreground when willing to use the Mac keyboard as a MIDI device

Yeah, that would be a better alternative than routing the audio, MIDI and all that rewire junk. Just a simple MIDI transfer does the trick. Thanks, I’ll try it out.

Here’s what you want (free and a doddle to use):

http://www.manyetas.com/creed/midikeys.html

It’s on this page: