Show HN: MidiPad 2 – A customizable Midi Pad Controller | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MidiPad 2 – A customizable Midi Pad Controller

midipadapp.com

47 pointsthedjinn18 comments

You shouldn't advertise your site the day you register your domain. Filters like WebSense block new domains. I've seen this happen multiple times here.

I wonder if there's a correlation between a domain name's age, and the HN rank of posts that link to them.

Interesting that you use motion sensors to create midi velocity. How accurate is that?

Any reason for not adding midi sliders and knobs too? Most MIDI apps include those and are used by many composers/musicians.

I'm also curious about motion sensors for MIDI. I would have thought 3d-touch would be more accurate

3D touch is not supported on all devices unfortunately.

Yeah I was wondering about that too. From my brief testing 3d touch senses the pressure after the initial touch. Not sure if it can sense the pressure of a tap. At least I didn't see an option like that in the API. Correct me if I'm wrong.

The accuracy is a trade-off between latency and precision. The touch event arrives as soon as you touch the screen, but the actual force of your touch still needs a few milliseconds to actually put the device into motion. Waiting a little bit while collecting measurements gives you quite an accurate indication of the force used, but the increased latency makes it harder to play.

Sliders and knobs will be added in a future version. I wanted to put an MVP on the app store first before adding additional features.

Sliders and knobs are one thing, but this format really invites the use of XY controllers where sliding a finger in the x-dimension modulates one parameter, while the y-dimension modulates another. I am certain more complex schemes should be possible, especially given the possibilities of multi-touch input. I would love to see something like this included.

I guess we have different definitions of minimum viable product- without knobs and sliders its an instant "oh well".

I think your app looks nice and clean but I just don't see it making a foothold along with the plethora of midi apps available. The midi velocity seem to be your biggest differentiator from competitors but I'm not sure it's enough to gain traction.

Since it's an MVP you're working on I'm going to give you some insight that will hopefully help you out. I'm a composer who mostly works on film and tv. I'm also a hobbyist programmer so I usually end up making our own apps if needed. In the composer community we mostly use TouchOSC and Lemur but both of those apps haven't been updated recently. Lemur is pretty powerful but requires quite a bit of knowledge for non-tech oriented folks. If you'd be able to create interactive and dynamic midi/osc interface like people do with Lemur but much more user friendly I think you'd have an audience.

Isn't that how all of the older iOS apps like Garage Band did drums and such? Not that it was terribly accurate there either, but I assumed it had gotten better since my last iOS device (an old iPad 2).

Velocity sensitive pads on a touch screen? Wow, didnt know this was possible.

Garage Band for iOS did it on release back in 2011. Using the accelerometer it's possible to simulate some sort of velocity.

Exactly. The general idea is that you get a measurement of the applied force, so integrating that value gives you an approximate velocity.

Assuming you worked on the app based on your other replies. Is 3D Touch applicable here?

Yes, that works. However, you would be facing the same problems. You can read out the pressure of a touch but the initial pressure is not the strongest since the finger is still in motion. Additionally, 3D touch is not supported on all devices.

Another interesting thing is that there are also private APIs for reading out the estimated finger size of a touch. This can give you even more information to determine the velocity from, as light touches are usually done with the fingertips.

The Roli app has a good implementation of this on 3D Touch enabled iOS devices.

Only on ios.

Android has no chance of competing in the MIDI/Music field: choosing Java was an ill decision because of the huge latencies its poor performance imposes, which makes any serious Music application plain impossible. Google promised a low latency Android years ago which as predicted by many of us they didn't deliver: that would require rewriting entire layers of the OS from scratch migrating them from Java to C++ just to make some music freaks happy. Just no way.

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