TouchMIDI

So... I'm back. Still working on the thesis. Or not working on it perhaps.

My wonderful wife bought me a keyboard last Christmas and birthday (she wouldn't let me play the upper two octaves until after my birthday ;). My criterion was 88 weighted keys. We bought the Casio CDP100 at Guitar Center for $275 on black Friday after a bit of shopping around. I planned just to use it as a midi controller for fluidsynth samples of grand pianos so I didn't really care about whatever built in voices it had. I wanted a real feeling keyboard so the weighted keys were a must. And it actually has pretty decent samples on its own. I love it. But I also love playing with synthesizers.



This is where the CDP falls a little short. There is midi in and out but very limited controls. Especially missed were the expression controls of the pitch and mod wheels.

I googled usb midi controllers hoping to find a standalone pitch and modwheel controller. I considered the Korg nanoKontrol, but the pitch wouldn't be sprung and I'd never get the tuning back during a solo. Then I found the vst plugin Touchpad 2 midi. VST for windows only. Nuts.

Wait. I can program!
So I whipped up a frankenstien touchpad midi controller program from the synclient synaptic touchpad configuration utility and the virtual midi piano keyboard project. I used it for a while but there was no GUI and it wasn't very stable. So I kind of forgot about it.

Then I started listening to the Open Source Musician Podcast. They are total open source advocates so I started wanting to give back to the community. We have no money so I was trying to figure out what to give. Then I thought about trying to clean up the code for TouchMIDI and releasing it.


It shouldn't take too long, right? I stabilized the main loop, then switched from Netbeans to QtCreator. added a GUI, then added an xy table mode and some other features and some 20 hours that I didn't really have to spare later I released:

TouchMIDIv0.1!