Posts Tagged ‘PD’

HowTo: 14bit Midi from PD to Ableton Live

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

Midi sucks. I never understood how people could work with 7bit when it comes to filters or mixing consoles. That’s why I started building my [mixer controller]. Now that it at least works halfway, I started experimenting with its implementation with common computer programs. Luckily, Live has the ability to handle 14bit midi messages, and its easy!

How 14bit midi works

The regular MIDI control message has 7bits, giving you a number between 0 and 127. 14bit messages use two of those, using two corresponding control messages. Looking at the list of [MIDI controller numbers] you can see that numbers 32-63 are “LSB for controllers 0-31”. They provide the 7 higher bits to our value. Controller 1 gives us 2^0 to 2^6, controller 33 will add 2^7 to 2^13. A device or program that uses 14bit midi will expect both messages to be sent together.

I built a small patch in PD that takes an analog signal read by an arduino and converts it to two midi messages, sending a 14bit midi message on channel 2, using controller 1 and 33. Note that the Arduinos analog in uses only 10bit. That’s why we multiply the incoming number with 16, adding 4 bits.

converting a 10bit number into a 14bit MIDI message

The messages are sent via a virtual MIDI port. Here’s a nice tutorial how to set that up on a mac: http://www.johanlooijenga.com/tools/5-apps/12-virtual-ports.html

How to implement 14bit control messages in Ableton

It’s very easy. Activate Abletons MIDI learn function, click on whatever you want to control and turn your knob or use whatever controller you want to implement. Ableton will recognize it. Now look on the bottom of the screen and you’ll see a drop down menu where you can choose the kind of control message Ableton should expect from that controler. Here, you choose “Absolute(14bit)”. And there you go :)

Bottom left: choose the type of message you're receiving

I hope this helps! Let me know if I made a mistake or you didn’t understand something.

Arduino Multiplexing / Pure Data Communication

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

I’m learning a lot of Arduino stuff right now, since I started yet another project. The objective is to create controllers that output 14-Bit MIDI (also known as [NRPN]) or OSC. Reason is mainly that MIDI pisses me off thousandfold. Why the hell are we still stuck to 7 bits when it comes to controlling musical equipment?!?
So I sat down and started designing a sort of mixer controller for use with [Pure Data] that not only controls but also get a visual feedback on sound levels in the form of LED bar graphs. I did a basic layout I will post later. For now it looks like a standard mixing console with

  • 4 channels having
  • 1 Fader
  • 9 knobs (typically 1xGain, 4xEQ, 4xAux)
  • 10 Buttons (Mute, PFL, 4xGroup, 4xPre/Post)
  • 10 LEDs to show button states
  • 1 12 LED bargraph to show audio levels

 

That is a lot of analog in and output. Considering the amount of free pins on an Arduino, this calls for some serious multiplexing, of which I did first tests in the last days.

Pure Data audio levels on a LED bar graph

I did some first tests connecting two 10LED bar graphs to 3 4093 shift registers. I played audio files in PD, using [env~] to get the dB levels on a scale from one to ten and send them to the Arduino which then conveyed them into the registers. This was a bit tricky since a register only goes to 8 and the two leftover LEDs have to be controlled with the next one. I got it running after a while, though.

Results: I tested several intervals for [env~] and settled for 8000 samples. Everything else made the display too jumpy. The dynamic of the scale is still not satisfactory. That is something that might be solved by software, but the binary output of the 4096 also limits it a lot. While it`s really cheap this way, I might be better off using a D/A converter.

I learned quite some things about serial communication and it’s parsing with the Arduino. I might write a tutorial these days…

Multiplexing analog Inputs with the 4051

To handle the above amount of sliders and potis I’ll have to do multiply it’s analog inputs. The cheapest way I found so far is to use 4051s  (8 ins) or 4067s (16 ins). I salvaged a circuit board from a broken midi keyboard of mine that had 8 sliders and 8 knobs in combination with two 4051s, so I wrote a patch that reads these 16 controllers and reports changes to PD. That worked extremely well. I will post the Arduino program and the circuit here in a while.

PD Video Player with Sound

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

I had the idea to build a kind of solid state video player using Linux and Puredata with an Arduino. The educated reader might ask “Why PD?” and, of course, is right. The simple answer is: Because I can and its easy.

I take the latter back. When I came up with this I had totally ignored, that Puredata/Gems Pix_Film object doesn’t play sound. This means, video and sound have to be played in separate players and then be synced. Some research in PDs list gave me an example I started working with and I was partially successful. Video and sound sync well with a [vline~] but with high resolutions the sound glitches. This can be reduced by trying different video codecs (motionjpg is supposed to work pretty well) but still I wasn’t able to play 1280×1024 videos without the sound dropping sometimes. I didn’t have this problem using the [pix_buffer] object, but this way the video is loaded into the RAM uncompressed, which takes up tons of space and limits the possible length of videos loaded/used. This was on my MacBook with 2x2GHz and an onboard Intel 9400m graphics card. I will try it on Linux in the next days, lets see, if it works better.

However, I expect no wonders and theres no sense in building a solid state video player that needs hardware this expensive (and energy intensive). I want to use one of these fit-pcs, loving their small design and power consumption. For them to work with videos of that resolution I need to use their hardware acceleration, which might prove difficult on Linux (I heard nothing good about the support of intels gma500) and even worse when relying on PD/Gem, which uses OpenGL to render video. So the plan now is to use a common video player like VLC or mplayer and remote control it via network/localhost. That should take care of the hardware acceleration and still make use of the serial interface and interaction possibilities of PD. Stay tuned…

Pure Data Video Player with Audio Sync

This patch syncs video and audio

 

 

PD and Arduino

Monday, October 18th, 2010

I explored some ways to use PD to communicate with an Arduino. There are wo ways to interact with an Arduio from PD: serial communication via the [comport] object and controlling the Arduino directly with [pduino] using the firmata firmware.

[comport] simply sends and receives serial messages. I found it a little difficult to convert those messages into the right format as to understand and further process them. The PD help file isn’t exactly helpful to that extend, but I found a patch called ArduinoPDMessageSystem that makes sense of the serial messages, even though I haven’t understood every objects function there yet.

So far, I have managed to send messages to the Arduino to interface a HCF4094 shift register controlling 8 LEDs. I use the same register to control my “Diskokugel”, so heres for the next step to its completion :-)

Crazy AV Machines Workshop

Monday, October 4th, 2010

The past week I participated in a PD workshop run by Oscar Martin and Luca Carruba at NK gallery. The workshop lasted one week and ended with a collaborate performance where all participants used their patches made during the workshop. I can’t tell you how that turned out because unfortunately I had to leave two days early to finish another job. However, the workshop was quite inspiring. Oscar and Luca rushed us through the possibilities of the software so fast that I imagine it hard for an actual newbie to keep up. For me it was quite informative, especially since I had my own agenda, wanting to know how to communicate with an Arduino with PD as means of an interface.

I’ve worked with Max/MSP and VVVV before and also had a look at JMax and PD back in 2002. PD has evolved a lot since then and since it is a piece of true open source software it has all my sympathies. The community is active and I´ve found the mailing list extremely patient and useful.