I tried working with it once using my EWI-USB, but found that for my uses -- live performance -- the latency of accessing it via the networking was too high to be of use. I've ended up making a number of VST's instead and switching over to Reaper, which better fit my needs anyways.
Especially when it comes to talking to my Morpheus board. It's got 4xEMU 10K2 with a gig of RAM on a dedicated PCI board, circa 1998... Never been able to find any info on the board itself, got it whilst working for a music production company sometime around 2000 when I was doing paid music transcription for Karaoke machines, I don't think more than a dozen were ever actually made -- but being EMU10k's the Creative Audigy drivers recognize the chips and mixers even under Win10. It's literally from a MIDI standpoint like plugging in four Audigy SE's and having them all output to a single stereo quarter inch jack. 256 wavetable voices, 64 midi channels, one card.
I meant to revisit Ableton though when/if I ever get around to continuing my Zoot project -- a homebrew variation of the EWI.
Early semi-working version, the 12mhz Atmega based Teensy 2.0 wasn't quite up to handling MIDI and the capacitive touch at the same time. I was thinking maybe the new 160mhz ARM4 Teensy's, but starting to think something with a bit more oomph like a cubieboard might be in order.
Sadly my health is in a place where wiring and woodworking are increasingly out of the question. I also want to open-source any software and design aspects of it, but to do so I have to check all the possible patent and copyright issues given that Akai holds onto the rights to a lot of the required IP like Gollum does his "precious" -- IP they didn't even invent and just bought up when Nyle Steiner was desperate for operating cash. But if Yamaha and Casio were able to side-step it without paying royalties, there has to be a way.
I think the best bet though is to just drop the capacitive touch in favor of real switches, something like the Cherry "speed silver" perhaps. Then even the early Arduino's that you can get $3 knock-offs of from china would be overkill. After all you remove the capacitive touch from it, and a EWI-USB is no more complex than a xbox controller. Three analog strain sensors, one air pressure sensor, nine to twelve buttons, turned into a MIDI data stream. YAWN.
Though I wish there was a x86 raspberry pie form factor powerful enough to run sample modeling's softsynth VST's -- but sadly they all come up... lacking in raw CPU power. If I dropped down to Win XP to reduce the overhead, use ASIO4ALL, and older discontinued versions of "The Sax Brothers" I can JUST BARELY run everything off a 1.6ghz first-gen Atom with 2 gigs of RAM, but 2ghz Core 2 scale performance would be the ideal minimum. Nobody seems to make that in a form factor I can stuff into a wind controller.
But yeah, Ableton's TCP networking capabilities are cute for start/stop/file loading/preset loading, but fell short in terms of my real-time recording and playback needs.
Oh, and I do still use it for laying down some tracks and for some effects that don't have VST's and only work with it -- but in those cases I then record the output and play it back as a track in Reaper when working live. Again, not something the networking capabilities really helps with.
I tried working with it once using my EWI-USB, but found that for my uses -- live performance -- the latency of accessing it via the networking was too high to be of use. I've ended up making a number of VST's instead and switching over to Reaper, which better fit my needs anyways.
Especially when it comes to talking to my Morpheus board. It's got 4xEMU 10K2 with a gig of RAM on a dedicated PCI board, circa 1998... Never been able to find any info on the board itself, got it whilst working for a music production company sometime around 2000 when I was doing paid music transcription for Karaoke machines, I don't think more than a dozen were ever actually made -- but being EMU10k's the Creative Audigy drivers recognize the chips and mixers even under Win10. It's literally from a MIDI standpoint like plugging in four Audigy SE's and having them all output to a single stereo quarter inch jack. 256 wavetable voices, 64 midi channels, one card.
I meant to revisit Ableton though when/if I ever get around to continuing my Zoot project -- a homebrew variation of the EWI.
Early semi-working version, the 12mhz Atmega based Teensy 2.0 wasn't quite up to handling MIDI and the capacitive touch at the same time. I was thinking maybe the new 160mhz ARM4 Teensy's, but starting to think something with a bit more oomph like a cubieboard might be in order.
Sadly my health is in a place where wiring and woodworking are increasingly out of the question. I also want to open-source any software and design aspects of it, but to do so I have to check all the possible patent and copyright issues given that Akai holds onto the rights to a lot of the required IP like Gollum does his "precious" -- IP they didn't even invent and just bought up when Nyle Steiner was desperate for operating cash. But if Yamaha and Casio were able to side-step it without paying royalties, there has to be a way.
I think the best bet though is to just drop the capacitive touch in favor of real switches, something like the Cherry "speed silver" perhaps. Then even the early Arduino's that you can get $3 knock-offs of from china would be overkill. After all you remove the capacitive touch from it, and a EWI-USB is no more complex than a xbox controller. Three analog strain sensors, one air pressure sensor, nine to twelve buttons, turned into a MIDI data stream. YAWN.
Though I wish there was a x86 raspberry pie form factor powerful enough to run sample modeling's softsynth VST's -- but sadly they all come up... lacking in raw CPU power. If I dropped down to Win XP to reduce the overhead, use ASIO4ALL, and older discontinued versions of "The Sax Brothers" I can JUST BARELY run everything off a 1.6ghz first-gen Atom with 2 gigs of RAM, but 2ghz Core 2 scale performance would be the ideal minimum. Nobody seems to make that in a form factor I can stuff into a wind controller.
But yeah, Ableton's TCP networking capabilities are cute for start/stop/file loading/preset loading, but fell short in terms of my real-time recording and playback needs.