New version of farmpad - os x hack for padKontrol

Discussion relating to Korg Controller products.

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sawatzki
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farmpad 1.2.1 - sub-scenes, display control

Post by sawatzki »

flycycle wrote:Not sure what you mean by 'address the display by midi'?
I was thinking along this line: send a midi message from your DAW to the pad that will change the display - e.g. to reflect different parts of a song or so... not sure whether this clears it up... ;-)

one could specify in a config file, which midi message refers to which display message - midi clock would not be needed, and custom metronome display would be possible.
I was thinking about this because I work a lot with odd meters and meter changes in my music, and the metronome of most DAWs is very limited in terms of beat-grouping. E.g., in live, a 6/8 meter is always "Click-tak-tak-tak-tak-tak" instead of "Click-tak-tak-Tok-tak-tak", which would be musically correct most of the time. Not to speak of 5/4, 7/8 or anything like that...

In my pre-farmpad-aera (wow - how did I survive back then?), I used to program my own visual metronome clips as midi notes sent to the pads of the pK. If I could do the same with the display, my pads would be free to reflect other information than the metronome...


flycycle wrote:For shift functions and sub-scenes, I think I'm going to add in more ways of selecting scenes - so holding a switch to show a scene temporarily, or having switches that directly access a specific scene. I think that would cover what you're suggesting?
Almost... ;-)

I would find it very practical to switch scenes only for a selected group of pads/switches and leave the rest of them in the current scene to keep the visual feedback running.
Selecting a sub-scene by direct access or holding a switch would then only affect a certain area of the padKontrol - you know what I mean?

I'm so excited about this software that I probably post way too much and ask for too many things at once, please forgive me if that's the case! ;-)

As for the GUI, I'm a real beginner at programming. But I once had a look at REALBasic, an easy visual development surrounding - just downloading the demo again - last time i used it was in 2003... *g*

Maybe that'll do the job...


Thank you once again for the great work!

Raphael
zoomzoom
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Post by zoomzoom »

the new additions are awesome!

what about global buttons? ones that don't change led state or control across all scenes.

that and the addition of fixed velocity would be a dream come true.
sawatzki
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Post by sawatzki »

zoomzoom wrote:...that and the addition of fixed velocity would be a dream come true.
Well, fixed velocity is there since version 1.2...
flycycle wrote:Hi, sorry it's been a while - I've upped a new version of farmpad (1.2) which has some new stuff for the melody makers..

- Noteshift option - can be used for octave up/down style behaviour.
- Velocity curves - pads can be set to a softer or harder response than default, or have a fixed velocity.
- Program change - makes a pad send a midi program change message.
- Sustain mode.

The pad_notes.txt example config file shows how to use the new features.
;-)
flycycle
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Post by flycycle »

zoomzoom wrote:the new additions are awesome!

what about global buttons? ones that don't change led state or control across all scenes.

that and the addition of fixed velocity would be a dream come true.
Hi zoomzoom, I'll add global buttons in very soon, maybe in the next release, if not the one after. As sawatzki said fixed velocity is in 1.2 - add 'velocity:fixed' to controls you want to be fixed, then use minvalue and maxvalue to edit the on and off values.

@sawatzki - I'll think about the visual metronome stuff, I'll add something along these lines in at some point, but I'm not sure what form it'll take yet.

I think once I've got global buttons and different ways of selecting scenes sorted it might not be necessary to have sub-scenes, but we'll see! I'll keep it in mind for sure while working on new stuff.

Don't worry about asking questions and making suggestions, I don't mind at all. If you're worried about clogging up the forum then you can email me, but I don't think it's a problem.

As for the gui thing I might knock something together in Max/MSP to control farmpad but that'll have to wait for the moment, not enough hours in the day! ;)
zoomzoom
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Post by zoomzoom »

oh wow, sorry bout that. can't believe i missed it.
sawatzki
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GUI

Post by sawatzki »

I'm just fiddling aroud with REALbasic to make a "real basic" interface - just to get to know how that works.

I'm planning on making a very much more sophisticated editor, but my programming skills are not worthy enough to be called skills.... ;-)

but, here is a screenshot of my first try:

Image

Is there someone who has experience with realbasic?
S4racen
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Post by S4racen »

Hi Sawatzki,

Sorry mate i've got no skills in anything, but what you've started with looks great!

If only we could access the config files visually like the editor software should work for the PK.

Hey flycycle any plans to sell this back to Korg as the application they should have sold the Pk with in the first place?

Cheers
D
sawatzki
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Post by sawatzki »

s4racen wrote:If only we could access the config files visually like the editor software should work for the PK.
That's what I'm working on. I just have to wrap my head around object-based programming yet... making a gui is no problem, creating the functionality is something different... ;-)

But, a graphical editor is basically no big deal. All the settings made in the editor have to be printed to a text file and that has to be loaded with farmpad.

I'm just struggling with basic things - like selecting some pads and/or switches and making a group e.g....

If there would be a REALbasic programmer out there, I can offer the gui pretty fast.

But if not, I'll just go on learning that language (and way of thinking)...
And maybe an editor pops out in the end! :-)
sawatzki
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Bugs in 1.2.1?

Post by sawatzki »

sawatzki wrote:Is it just me, or is it a common bug that after running farmpad for a while, pressing a pad or switch activates, deactivates and/or flashes all other switches / pads randomly???#-o

It seems as if a pad has many different stages - first press: invert all pads'n'switches' state, second press: activate itself, third press: invert all pads'n'switches again, fourth press: deactivate itself and so on.. but it's not always that logical... #-o #-o

At first i thought it might have been me, because i just modded my face-plate and had to take the whole dang thing apart to do that. :3dthumbs:

But since everything works fine in the Korg-mode, i am wondering... :-s
EDIT: Problem solved, post kept for clarity!

I found my problem: while I was testing my GUI-application, it started farmpad a couple of times but couldn't exit the active mode because it hung up on me. So I went to the terminal, entered and exited the farmpad via commandline, and - voila: the controller was back in Korg mode.
What I didn't think of is the following:
When I start farmpad through a shell command in my GUI and the GUI crashes, that instance of farmpad is still running and leaves it's MIDI Port in the system. If I start farmpad for a second time, there are two farmpads running and getting confused because they both receive input from the triggers and send info to the trigger's LEDs.

I found out, when I started the Korg librarian app and wanted to choose a MIDI Port. There were 16 or so ports called farmpad...!
That seemed fishy to me, so i rebooted. The ports were gone, and no more trigger-madness in was happening in farmpad.

To make sure, I reproduced the problem: I opened a shell window in the terminal and started farmpad. Everything was working fine on the pad. Then, I opened a second shell window in the terminal and started farmpad again. With two instances of farmpad running, the pad reacted as described in the beginning of this post. After quitting any one of the two processes, the pad's lights behaved normally again.
Maybe there are some possibilities lurking in this unexpected behaviour? Could running multiple instances of farmpad be of any good? *thinking deeply*



... whatever...
i'll go make some more music instead of nerding around!


Sawatzki :-({|=
nobbystylus
Posts: 9
Joined: Sat Dec 01, 2007 9:04 pm

Post by nobbystylus »

i love this app! i am struggling with getting the config file to do exactly what i need however.. any help appreciated.

basically i want 16 separate scenes,
scene 1 i want to be mutes (tracks 1-8 in Live correspond to toggles 1-8), and solos (for same tracks, corresponding to 09-16),
scene 2 i want to be compatible with drum racks, ideally with x and y keys to move up and down the rack list in Live
scene 3 i want to be launch/stop keys for tracks 1-8

I can figure out how to make one scene work how i need it (i have scene 1 working perfect) but i can't figure out how to make the multiple scenes work..

how do i access the scenes 1-16 via the config file?

cheers guys.. sorry just been banging my head against this one.. a GUI would obviously help and i would be willing to donate for the development of one!!
flycycle
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Post by flycycle »

S4racen wrote:Hey flycycle any plans to sell this back to Korg as the application they should have sold the Pk with in the first place?
:lol: Thanks, no plans! ;)

@sawatzki - good effort on the gui, let me know how it goes :) farmpad isn't designed to work with more than one copy running at a time - each copy was listening to the padKontrol and then sending messages back to it, so with 12 copies running at once no wonder it was getting confused :) If you want to relaunch farmpad, normally you'd quit the running instance with ctrl+c, which will cause farmpad to quit cleanly and return the padKontrol to its normal state. If you're trying to launch and relaunch farmpad from another app you'll need to find a way of quitting the running instance so that only one runs at a time. Don't know RealBasic so can't help you there... Really though, with lots of scenes you shouldn't need to relaunch farmpad while it's running, at least that's the idea!

@nobbystylus - take a look at the example config file 'scenes.txt' which shows an example of how to edit scenes - the examples are in the disk image. If you've already got one scene working it's easy to work on another, all you do is add a 'scene:x' command, then everything after that applies to that scene. Here's another example:

Code: Select all

// edit the control number of pad 1 - by default you're editing scene 1
pad_1:
     control:99

// now edit pad 1 in scene 2
scene:2
pad_1:
     control:100

// now set the led text in scene 16
scene:16
led:This is scene 16

// now set up a scene switch which lets you change between scenes
sceneswitch_1:17 // sets ROLL to be the scene select switch for scenes 1-16
Hope this helps, let me know if you're still having problems.

I'm not going to do a GUI for farmpad, in the near future anyway, as I never planned to make it a fully blown application - it was just a small hack I did to get it working how I wanted, which has grown quite a bit since :) I'm planning to add some changes to make configs easier to write though, something like:

Code: Select all

pads:1-16
mode:trigger // sets pads 1 to 16 to trigger mode

scenes:20-24
pads:1-16
channel:10 // sets pads 1 to 16 in scenes 20 to 24 to channel 10
sawatzki
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Post by sawatzki »

Thanks, flycycle for your small hack... :-)
very humbly put, in my opinion! :-)
How did you get started on the whole hack?

The GUI thing isn't all that important actually, but it would make the hidden features of the padKontrol available to many musicians who get scared shitless when they have to type something into a terminal. That's why they are on mac's, anyways! :-)

@flycycle: I'm pretty sure 64 scenes are plenty and there is no need to restart farmpad with different settings in a live situation.
But when creating a setup and configuring the pad, I try different settings a lot. So i often quit and restart the app with an updated config file.
To make this easyer, i would love to make a button in the GUI update the settings in farmpad - thus restarting it with an updated confi file. This can be with a delay - no problem, as it is meant for tweaking around only and not for live.
Or is there a way to send new settings to farmpad once it's running?

A friend and fellow musician knows his way around in objective-C, so i guess we'll have a little GUI that can create and load config files and start (and hopefully quit) the farmpad application. Stay tuned...

It's gonna be called farmKontrol... ;-)


(as long as nobody bothers...)
mike holiday
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Joined: Sun Dec 23, 2007 2:29 pm

Post by mike holiday »

cheers,

farmpad is great, I made a step sequencer to use with farmpad.
I should have posted this here earlier, but I hang out over there to much!


http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=

check it out, I'v actually expanded mine to operate four bars
plosive
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Post by plosive »

:(
korgs: MS20, MS20 Mini, MS2000, KP1/KP3, Kaossilator, microX, padKontrol, DS-10+, Electribe ESX-1, ER1-MKII, Monotribe+midi
zoomzoom
Posts: 17
Joined: Wed Nov 21, 2007 8:15 pm

Post by zoomzoom »

plosive wrote::(
agreed
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