touchpad controller

[Duncan Brinsmead]

It seems to me that laptop computer touchpads would make a nice controller device. There are two degrees of freedom and they are fairly well developed technology. Subtle motions are captured, such as rolling the finger or vibrato(I don\'t think one can access touch pressure, however). Has anyone tried to rig up one of these as an audio controller? I\'ve heard of a plugin that turns your mouse into a controller, which would presumably work with one of these. I\'m not using a laptop, so it might mean getting a standalone unit if possible. Another wacky controler might be a Wacom tablet with a pressure sensitive stylus. Some come with tilt sensing on the stylus as well(six variable controller inputs in one device!). The buttons on the stylus could also be used to control on/off things like sustain pedal.

Has anyone here tried adapting off the shelf computer input devices for midi controllers?

Duncan

[thesoundsmith]

I tried this years ago with a Wacom pad and my Apple IIe. With the equipment at the time, I was not satisfied with the results (DX7 didn\'t understand \'timbre\' except as add volume to an operator, which often as not went into that characteristic FM harmonic wind/unwind.) Also, no the IIe, the polling of the pad was not fast enough for accurate vibrato control (even with my assembler hand-written drivers!)

Today, the KW Expressionmate has the ribbon, but two-matrix control would be cool. Certainly worth a try, if anyone had the time to do PIII assembly Or C routines.

Try it, let us know how itworks...

Dasher

[JamesGrote]

yeah, doesn\'t cakewalk sell some x-y axis based DirectX effects program? can\'t remember the name off hand. made for mouse, or of course, a touchpad.