Renoise - Ultimate Touchosc Ipad Template?

Ideas & suggestions
1

After searching for renoise templates for TouchOSC iPad to no avail I’ve decided to just create my own using “usurped” features from other templates and osculator as the bridge.

So far I have four pages; Mixer (with 20 faders and master pans,solos,mutes), Keyboard (with enough keys for 4 octaves,pitchbend,modwheel,velocity and octave increment/decrement), Matrix (which I need help on), and Recording/Transport page.

I’m fuzzy on what you launchpad users are doing with the launchpad. I’ve watched danoise’s videos and see it’s doing some cool stuff with patterns/track muting/etc but would like a specific breakdown of best practice for programming the behaviours. I’m using osculator to script the template and it’s capable of scripting things like auto value return on pitchbend so I’m confidant the matrix page can be dope on a rope (with enough scripting muting a track/pattern even 2 modes one for editing and one for sequencing is possible.)

Without using it, what would be your feedback on this template arrangement? Would you like to see a transport on every page instead of it’s own (for different live scenarios)? What should the matrix page do?

And lastly, is there value in using Duplex instead of osculator? Any feedback or help appreciated, I’ll make the template available if anyone wants in or once its ready for primetime.

~8B

2

The most direct way to link TouchOSC to Renoise would be through the GlobalOSCActions. You could work your way through each mapping, creating a small code snippet for each mapping (granted, a lot of work).

The alternative way would be to hook it into Duplex. I can help with that (PM me the template you’ve written and I’ll see what I can do? ). This should give you some more flexibility than using osculator, as Duplex is using direct API calls instead of just the features which are currently MIDI mappable.

3

That’s cool danoise, hooking into duplex is probably the way to go here. Using OSCulator requires the corresponding template mappings loaded in, which in itself is an extra step on top of having to load in the custom renoise midi mappings. Programming the OSCulator side of things and mapping to renoise is pure tedium as well. I imagine duplex would cancel at least a few of those steps out and the user would see a version of the template in the preview window. Then take it from there.

I’ve nixed the matrix pattern page and instead went with another midi note map trigger page. What I was trying to accomplish seemed impossible without complex global lua programming along with an OSCulator learning curve (futile if we can do this in duplex.) I’ll finish up what I have and PM you so expect a .osc file soon.

~8

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@danoise: Your profile said you can’t receive any more messages so here it is for yours and public consumption.

8Bit’s Renoise TouchOSC iPad template

To use you must have Osculator (http://www.osculator.net/) running along with Renoise. There is currently no PC version of osculator so for PC/Android folks, im open to suggestions or wait for the Duplex port?

Tested on Renoise version 2.7.2 with iPad2.

Description:

This is a custom iPad template for Renoise control using TOUCHOsc on an iPad.

There are 4 pages; Mixer, Keyboard, Pads, Sequencer. A mini-transport is available on all pages with page specific controls (for instance, you can turn quantize on by pressing the Q button in the keyboard/pad pages)

The transport contains Play, Stop, Record and Loop. Keep in the mind renoise does not talk back to TOUCHOsc so if you set the record on one page and switch to another, chances are it wont still be lit. This mean you have to switch it again to get visual sync. Same applies with loop and play.

The Mixer allows user to control the volumes, mutes, solos and pans for the first 10 tracks. Using the Views buttons you can change what you see on the screen to reflect your current workflow.

The effects sends do nothing at the moment since Renoise maps effects differently based on order in the chain we will have to get back to this for universal support. In the meantime, since these are already pseudo-mapped you can set them (if you know how to use OSCulator) to whatever you want.

A word on solo: You may want to rely on muting tracks instead of solo’ing since the behaviour of the GUI does not properly indicate what is solo’d or not (instead the button is either on/off, so watch your screen!)

Keyboard and Pads give 2 varieties of triggering options to enter notes. Pitch Bend does not behave like a real one. It will not return to zero so use your fingers for that. On both pages you can increment/decrement track number so laying down a song is user friendly (as well as octave and instrument controls.)

The Sequencer page is intended for live jamming and allows cue triggering of up to 32 sequences of a song. The track mutes on this page allow for micro control (live track muting) without having to go back to the mixer page. Pattern buttons on top immediately switch to the next or previous pattern (there is no cueing done like on the grid.) TAP tempo works but does not alter the tempo of your song, instead look at the bottom of your renoise screen for the results and manually enter the tempo,

Files:

Renoise2.touchosc - this is the file that goes in your TOUCHOsc application, either sync it with TouchOSC Editor by opening it and syncing it (I had no luck getting their app to sync so good luck.) If you are jailbroken navigate to the TouchOSC application directory Library/Layouts and create a folder named “Renoise2.touchosc” and place this index.xml file in it. On your next load of the template it should work.

Renoise-Controller - this is the file you load into OSCulator that contains the mappings information.

touchosc-renoise-map.xrnm - midi mappings in renoise. Click on “MIDI MAP” in renoise and load this directly in.

Final Words/Download:

Watch your screen at all times! This GUI is intended as an accessory to Renoise and is victim to the software controlling it. I’ve found it acts strange at times (mutes are on but the track isn’t muted until you press it again, mysterious hold notes on keyboard/pad pages, song time is totally wrong and gives odd numbers) and will altogether stop working with excessive use due to wifi dropout or software overflows. Again, watch your screen, the template gives no feedback.

Since I clocked hours on this, if you end up using it, tell me about it or shout me out.

That should be it! Now go make some tunes!

1 Like
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Did this ever get ported to Duplex? Have you considered making a mapping for Pure Data? It’s multiplatform and free unlike Osculator. I’ll see what I can come up with.

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As of this post, danoise hasn’t responded to the post and I’m no duplex hacker but feel free to port away to Pure Data. Would be nice if this thing was working for everyone. The few tunes I’ve made with the ipad interface and renoise come out quicker and live triggering is, in a word, dope on a rope. Do it!

7

Sorry, this slipped past me. Forums are like that.

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Danoise, are you interested in getting it going in Duplex still? I’m going to look into Pure Data later today to see how complicated it would be to convert the osculator mapping. Haven’t found any automated utilities. Maybe I shouldn’t bother and should focus on a Duplex conversion. Thinking that either way I go it’s going to require a lot of time.

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Good stuff. I really like seeing this sort of stuff, since it gives me ideas as to what other people expect from a TouchOSC layout. Thanks for rekindling my interest, I keep getting sidetracked by life.

Porting this to pd or Duplex is pretty much going to be as tedious as setting everything up in Osculator.

Porting a lot of the stuff to Duplex really isn’t that difficult. (just tedious at times) I’d imagine that it’d be more “defining what’s happening by editing text files” than it would be do it in Osculator (I don’t run Osculator at all, so I’m just guessing.)

Are all of these things even implemented in Duplex yet? I know many of them are, but some might not be. Implementing new “applications” is going to be some portion of getting this ported.

Porting to Duplex would really help with that. The bi-directional aspect is the beauty of TouchOSC and Duplex. Your TouchOSC layout would reflect what’s going on. Not to mention, TouchOSC is mildly dynamic(I wish it were more dynamic). Put those things together and things get really awesome.

Duplex is really the way to go with TouchOSC and Renoise. The possibilities are endless. (Kudos to danoise, Duplex is totally badass)

I’d urge you to jump in and give it a shot porting it to Duplex. There’s so much that can be done, that having another person adding tools to the toolbag is always a good thing.

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In essence, I’d say, if you decide on a Duplex port then let’s split the task into two parts:

First part:

Do your research and learn about what’s possible with the current generation of Duplex apps: the mixer, effects, sequencer etc.
Looking at your layout, some parts could easily be expanded feature-wise: e.g. the Mixer could be made to scroll through tracks.

Second part:

Having established what’s possible and what’s not, the actual (re)design is done. The TouchOSC template is modified, and it’s Duplex counter-part (the control-map) is created.
Finally, you assign the various application to the control-map in a device-configuration - that should be it.

So, what about pads and the keyboard?

For now, I’d say that it makes perfect sense to use the first page as Duplexed applications that support visual feedback, and the next pages with pads and keyboard are going though osculator, or some other software that produce MIDI notes. The thing is, visual feedback is not needed for pads and keyboards.

Triggering samples has not been a priority in Duplex, because you can always connect your MIDI keyboard in the normal fashion, and a scripted solution is never going to be 100% precise, until we have some part of the Renoise API working as a real-time thread.

11

The common narrative here is none of us seem to have time or the know how to get the Duplex part going. I dug deep before I resorted to the interface I made, ripping off other templates and trying to take the easy way out. No other templates ported well or had what we renoise users needs to have - pads, sequence control, mixers, etc. Renoise needs its own layout so the challenge went from “let me make a quick renoise controller” to “How to construct a multifaceted open interface for a number of scenarios in studio, at home or jamming.”

After grinding my teeth into the easy way the hard way was the only way and probably clocked a good 16 hours remaking pages from scratch, redoing the tedious mappings, always with the final jam in mind. The money shot came when the iPad was finally doing what I wanted with renoise. The ideas and songs popped out like a bedbug infestation in a child labour mattress factory. Seemed like I was hitting save on great beats every 10 minutes, just recording the jams dreaming of making an entire live album with the interface and renoise. Finally, osculator would remind me to register and everything shut off, or the midi mappings would go bonkers out of nowhere.

With that image in mind (the child labour factory particularly) I am still down to make this thing work with duplex which leads me to the Pure data part of the convo…

Time wields its ugly face again, or rather not having any. Did you have any luck with this rezidue? I’m sure PC users would like to try it out but yes a duplex port should conquer that wall, it is cross-platform correct?

It would be better harder stronger faster for sure in duplex. Also, I would take on the task of doing Duplex hook but after reading the docs on duplex and perusing the code, I quickly retract. Where I fall short is where Soggy_cheerio and danoise seem to come in, you guys seem to have the unlock code on what I need to either give you or vice versa.

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Partly encouraged by this thread and something satobox did, Duplex will soon see a sample-triggering component.

All along, I have been telling people this:

“You can always connect your MIDI keyboard” … To answer this myself: well, yes, if you have one. And most iPad apps are OSC, not MIDI-based.

But the real stumbling block I saw as the precision issue. My conceptions are primarily based around how the note-router got deprecated (cancelled). Try reading this discussion for some insights into the realtime methods, and intricacies of note triggering:
http://www.renoise.c…r-experimental/

Initial tests indicate that response time is good, so once everything is settled, I will offer the keyboard / sample triggering component: it will be flexible as far as mappings go, able to emulate a traditional keyboard as well as individual buttons.
I have no idea how well it will integrate with Osculator, as I am a TouchOSC user myself. But in my setup, it works fine.

13

Bumping this year old topic since Duplex got a brand new fancy iPad configuration. It looks like this:

touchosc_ipad_config.png?raw=1

If we think about it, additional layouts would be possible too (matrix slots, isomorphic keyboard), but for starters I think this one is pretty good.
I read on the TouchOSC website that custom template support for Android is planned too (well, eventually)

Download the release here

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:w00t: :dribble: :w00t: :dribble:

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Looking tight!

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looks great! :)

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This is exactly what i searched since a long time. i’ve downloaded duplex, but where can i find the TouchOSC layout for renoise duplex ?

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It’s included with the download - to locate the preset, go to the tools menu in Renoise and select the Tool Browser.
Locate Duplex and rightclick → select “Reveal in Finder/Explorer/”. Finally, in that folder goto Duplex/Controllers/TouchOSC/Presets

It’s the same principle with all devices that require a special preset/layout.

1 Like
19

Thx a lot ! you saved my night , and my wife ;)

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everything seems ok except one thing.
I’ve well installed preset on my iPad, it looks like good but when i touch some control on the ipad nothing happens on duplex however i can see red and green leds flashes and when i do something on duplex it’s well displayed on the ipad. My port config is ok. I really don’t understand why duplex can display its action on touchOSC and TouchOSC can’t do it on duplex : \