Basically, if a wacom tablet is in pen mode (where cursor position corresponds to pen position on tablet), basically all sliders basically keep applying the change exponentially; sort of like tilting an analog joystick to an extreme, making pen mode pretty useless. Which is lame, because it’s great for drawing waves. In mouse mode (which acts like any normal mouse), this is not an issue.
I’m not entirely sure what causes this, but it occurs in ableton and renoise, and it basically denies me a lot of the benefits of a wacom tablet in the first place (which i use regularly for work; there’s no mouse in my setup).
Is there some way to fix this easily? While at it, wacom tablets support tilt and pressure as well, which could be used for things like setting pan and volume over a range of notes by drawing along them.
I don’t expect this implemented. But it’d be a nice note for the future
This is no answer to your question, but you might play around with your tablet as a midi contoller using software like http://midistylus.codeplex.com/ or similar, google for it and you will find some (You also might build your personal one using Max).
The pressure and tilt mapping would be really interesting. I’d love to play around with that on my Intuos5.
As for the slider manipulation, I don’t think that’s technically possible to fix. Mice provide relative positioning input, meaning they only send directional input, not an absolute location. That’s why sliders can work, since they lock your mouse in place and use that directional input to change the value of the slider (or something like that)
But a tablet in pen mode is forcing the cursor to specific positions, which screws up the slider.
The only way to fix this is for an update to the software that actually added in recognition for pen mode and changed the slider behavior accordingly. Or perhaps just a toggle option if you don’t mind switching manually.
I don’t have this behaviour with my intuos4 on windows 7 and I didn’t have it on my previous setup with a graphire4 and a graphire bluetooth on Unbuntu.
its certainly possible to use it to send cc messages with four parameters, x,y, speed and pressure. It requires a small maxmsp patch in the backgroud, with midi yoke
