Actually I’m using Osculator’s Logic control surface plugin, which sends the track name as an OSC message, so no stunts with MIDI sends required. So that’s a little bit like what you are doing, maybe, albeit not as advanced - I’m just looking for track selection messages, and you very likely have access to more details with your custom control surface plugin than what Osculator provides. The only other setup I’m doing on Logic’s side is using ARTzID to drive my articulation changes (so my solution is using three tools whereas it appears yours is all in one).
Ah, great; glad you've got it working that way! Much more sustainable. I wasn't actually aware of the Osculator control surface plug-in so that's good. I probably did a lot of the same work that they did when I wrote my plug-in.
I'm not using anything like ARTzID but now that Logic has expression map-like features, I should probably add a conversion tool like I'm planning on for Cubase. I haven't looked into it yet though.
One thing about Patchboard that might concern me is that the number of articulations available on the screen at one time looks to be smaller (I’m showing up to 63 of them at once, and I have some libraries such as Metropolis Ark 3 that need to have over 40 of them available on a single track). I’m also endeavoring to always have the same articulation (e.g., pizzicato) in the same physical screen location across all tracks, which is why in that clip you see the articulation buttons in various strange patterns rather than a solid block thereof ... the goal being for me to more easily develop some muscle memory than spans all of the strings tracks (for example) rather than always needing to visually search all of the articulation buttons.
Right now, it's not user configurable but the number of buttons you see depends on your screen size. Smaller screen, fewer buttons. I may make the buttons scale with screen size too. I just want to make sure they're easy to tap, regardless of the display.
One of my major goals is to reduce the amount of tweaking users have to do. I don't give users much control over where the buttons are placed, currently. They're just laid out linearly, left to right, top to bottom. You can add a blank button as a spacer but that's it. I really want to avoid asking users to lay out the buttons manually on a grid, though.
I've been thinking about adding a feature to automatically build a fixed, common layout between all the patches, resulting in something like what you've got. As long as people tag their articulations, e.g. with Tremolo or Pizz, I can dynamically lay out the buttons to keep things as similar from page to page as possible. That way, you don't need to manual configure the layout of the buttons.
My development process is entirely user-driven at this point, so it just takes a paying (or potentially paying) customer who really wants such a thing to request it. I'm trying to avoid developing things just because I think they're cool.
Quite true, except for two things: I’m no Lemur wizard yet, hehe ... this is basically my first major project with it, and I’m learning as I go, although I did have the advantage of being a long-time software developer in other languages already. The other thing is the fragility ... I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how reliable this is proving to be once I’ve worked out the kinks. Lemur definitely has some quirks, but it is also proving to be very fault-tolerant. I just wish it had some sort of a debugger. :/
Yeah, my worry about the fragility has less to do with Lemur or Osculator or any of the specific tools. More just how adding new stuff can be difficult and break things in hard to diagnose ways. And if you do it infrequently, you forget how to do it, which makes you less inclined to want to do it. At least you don't have to deal with MIDI transformers; that Osculator plug-in makes things much nicer!
Patchboard was initially built for Brian Tyler as a way to manage his oversized Pro Tools template, for instance; if adding a new patch was difficult or prone to breaking things, it just wouldn't fly. And since it's accessible and editable from any computer on his network, his assistants can fix mis-entered patches or add new ones on the fly from another computer even while he's working.
What I was thinking is if there was a way to integrate it with a dedicated Lemur program, such as having it send out an OSC message for each available articulation and continuous controller when a track is selected in it, so that Lemur could dynamically configure a set of buttons and controllers to operate it remotely. If the browser view on a tablet is sufficiently responsive and fully featured this may not have a value, but from your description it sounds like the browser view on a tablet might be more restricted than that seen on a computer, is that correct?
The browser view on the tablet is completely full-featured. It's identical to the view on the computer, in fact, though you don't have access to keyboard shortcuts for obvious reasons. The view on the computer is literally just a
thin wrapper around the web page. Patchboard is essentially comprised of three parts:
- Local web server that shows UI
- DAW integration service (typically a control surface plug-in, but depends on the DAW)
- Background service accessible from the menu bar (Mac) or system tray (Windows) that interfaces between the two components above.
Anyways, it would be easy enough to add such an OSC API. As I said, the goal is really to create a platform for building a fitted workflow tool, tailored to the individual. If someone wants to commission that feature for their workflow or there's enough community demand for it, then it would certainly be addable.
That said, in this case, I'd probably ask what features in the UI you'd want to change to achieve the same result. I'd rather you have a simpler setup with one tool rather than having to manage more components. We've got enough technology to manage—the fewer tools and computers we need talking to each other, the fewer potential areas for breakdown and technological headaches.
I'm all about simplifying the technology stack as much as possible. Let's be musicians first, tech people a very, very distant second.
That’s a very, very cool project you’ve got going there, and even though I’m pretty happy with how my own project is coming along, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on yours as well.
Looking forward to see how your turns out! Looks great already
And always happy to spitball ideas and answer any questions you might have about how I'm doing things; seems like you've got a bunch of great ideas going.