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5th November 2022 Youtube

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I'll outline my thinking here.

Generally, if you have an endless rotary encoder, or indeed a mouse or trackball, then at a raw level, it generates relative changes. If you have e.g. a touchpad, touchscreen, pen tablet, or potentiometer, it generates absolute changes or events. As such, a big mistake is being myopically limited to music software, and even more focussed only on soft synths.

Imagine:

You are editing text in a word processor. With the status quo, the 9 knobs on my NI M32 do nothing meaningful. Why can't e.g. the (stepped) knob on the right control the font size, or step through styles, or perhaps provide another way to page up and down?

Likewise, if I'm using e.g. Inkscape, why can't those 8 knobs control the stroke width, or colour components of the stroke and fill? Likewise controlling tool options in e.g Gimp or Krita.

A big failing of Midi is trying to shoehorn everything into a 7bit space. We want something 32bit,so that we have essentially a billion CC numbers and a billion channels, and so on, and allow longer messages, and so on. The only challenge then is organising everything.

If controlling things with knobs was universal and ubiquitous, not just music applications, then there would be economies of scale in making control devices. (I have been playing with this idea, as a proof of concept I modified the example 'scribble' app from the Qt framework so that I could change the colour components and brush width using the knobs on my M32, using simple UDP packets to send messages between applications (so one program listens to a midi device and outputs UDP, and the scribble app responds to UDP messages), but my programming skills are, at present, too limited.)

Things like 'hover focus', i.e. "this knob controls whatever is under the mouse pointer" is some possibility. Grouping VST UI controls into groups of 8 which then map naturally to the 8 knobs on devices like the Komplete Kontrol (standardising on 8 knobs is a good idea). And so on.

Being able to use a trackball not to control the mouse pointer (since I already have a mouse), but control anything that can do something meaningful with relative dx,dy messages. There is so much potential when you get outside the straitjacket of how things are at present.

And for the implementers, things are easier: you don't need to translate the +1/-1 of a rotary to MIDI CCs or anything, just send the +1/-1 signal (possibly accumulated into +n/-n) AS IS to the computer so that what happens next is totally SOFTWARE DEFINED. Then you want a patching environment like PureData/Max, but possibly without any kind of signal processing, and better primitives for routing messages.

That's the sort of idea I'm playing with at present. If anybody else wants to discuss ideas like this, it would be nice to set up an open forum where we can share ideas about what's possible, what's useful, what already exists, and how such things could be implemented.

An initial draft of a 'case for hedgehogs' is here: https://w.allsup.co/hedgehog/ideas/TheCaseForMx32