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Making music with the iPad is great, and I am planning to use this amazing device on stage, but there is one last thing holding me.

The iPad’s WiFI connection has the reputation of not being the most reliable, and I just don’t want to believe if it is okay to use it on stage, I need to be sure. The lack of an Ethernet port is indeed a strong selling point for Jazz-Mutant’s Lemur.

Six month ago, a friend told me that he was using TouchOSC and his iPhone 3GS plugged into the computer using a USB cable. A nice wired connection that he had, but it was only after he subscripbed to a tethering plan, and it sucks to pay big bucks if you don’t need to browse the internet.

There’s a solution if you are ready to jailbreak your iPad. I don’t use my iPad for critical applications, so, in case things go wrong, and since it is a WiFI only model, I will be able to merely restore the backed-up applications and settings using iTunes.

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Notes:

• This release will be the last version compatible with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 and PowerPC based computers (G4 and G5).
• Next version (2.10) will be only compatible with Intel based computers on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 and higher.

Changes:

• Fixed several stability problems related to MIDI input.
• Fixed some minor issues regarding the Wacom tablet daemon process stability.
• Fixed problems regarding the HID virtual joystick occurring in games part of the Humble Bundle. Virtual joysticks are also reset as they should when the application quits.
• Fixed a wrong count of clock ticks when receiving MIDI Clock data.
• Fixed a bug where Channel Velocity would be 0 for MIDI Notes using channel 16.
• The “Connect to Space Navigator” menu item is now working as expected.
• When searching for Bonjour enabled OSC services, limit the search to the local domain.

Tony Grund from Dubspot has made a 4 part video tutorial about TouchOSC and OSCulator. Not only the video is great, well explained and fun to watch, but also gives you all the resources you will need to get quickly started. It includes a sample Live set, TouchOSC layouts and preconfigured OSCulator documents.

Here is the first part of this tutorial. Highly recommended !

Here is a tutorial I have written that shows how to control TouchOSC LEDs with Ableton Live. The tutorial is rather long, but hopefully covers with enough detail this topic.

New Features:

• New commands allow to control the Wiimote drawer directly from OSC messages. This is useful for Max and Pd users that want a tighter integration of OSCulator with their own patchers. See the file General Command Syntax.maxpat in the Samples Library for more information.

Changes:

• Fixed a problem affecting Space Navigators.
• Fixed a problem where some Nunchuk models would not connect.
• Fixed a problem affecting emulators like BSNES, Nestopia, Sixtyforce under Mac OS X 10.6.3, where the synthesized keycode events would not be received.
• Changed the Bonjour service publishing name to avoid a problem happening when the computer was directly connected to the Internet.
• In the OSC Editor, allow to set a destination port to a value under 1024.
• Fixed a condition when two notes with the same pitch were configured on different MIDI Channels. This problem affected the following events: MIDI Note, Kyma Note, MIDI CC Toggle, MIDI Program Change, and Kyma Program Change.

TouchOSC on the iPhone was just a preview of things to come. Thanks to the bigger screen of the iPad, we begin to see much more usable, really nice looking interfaces. Folks on the Internet were wondering what the iPad would be for, but artists have a clear idea of what they can do with such a pretty device.

(here is a really nice looking video made by Ernesto Aello as known as VJ Pr4.)

Granted, Apple’s capacitive multitouch technology is not as musician friendly as Stantum’s (JazzMutant) resistive coating. In an interview with Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music, Guillaume Largillier (JazzMutant co-founder) shares his thoughts of what makes a great controller, and gives us hints of what we may expect from the future.

But for me the future is already there. With something that is not too expensive, we can create, interact, and perform in a new way. The most spirited of us can even write their own programs for the iPad.

From Ryan Noise:

How to use APPLE IPAD to control Ableton Live wireless using “OSC, OSCulator, Touchosc and Python script ”

Going to MusikMesse was lot of fun. First of all, I have been able to meet my friends, the CopperLan team, who were showcasing their new developments.

CopperLan is a new protocol for music and pro-audio that makes it easy to connect and control software and devices. It is self-configuring, plug and play, backwards compatible with MIDI.

CopperLan, unlike MIDI, is very easy to use. You just plug things together, and play with them. It lets you access the parameters of compatible software and devices in human readable form, it is fast, reliable, and can be used to control MIDI devices with almost no effort. I really hope this protocol will become popular because it will help solving lots of trouble we have with current protocols: MIDI is not precise enough and requires some knowledge to know what you are doing, and OSC suffers from network configuration, which can be tedious to deal with. Hopefully, CopperLan makes all this a thing of the past.

I also had the chance to meet the Elektron guys. I have to say I am a big fan of their product since a long time. At its beginnings, my band Neïmo, didn’t have a real drummer. Because we just needed to travel light, and wanted something that had a modern sound, we chose the MachineDrum as our drummer. So it was a real pleasure to meet the ones who invented what gave the sound to our first album.

There was also a rather impressive demonstration of the Reactable Live. This is a touch enabled table, with a projector inside that produces sounds that are controlled by a set of “fiducial” symbols you put on the table. To better understand how it works, take a look at this video of Björk performing with the Reactable.

Changes:

• Fixed a problem affecting the Wiimote Balance Board and extensions plugged on the MotionPlus.
• Removed automatic configuration for mrmr.
• Fixed a scaling problem for angular data in the TUIO protocol.
• Fixed a problem where a document would be saved with inconsistent data on a slow computer with a very large file.
• Added a new Wiimote address to the Perfect Pairing extension.
• In the main window, messages sorting has been enhanced.

Alexander Schubert has notified me of a new piece he wrote for drum kit, arm sensors, live electronics and live video.

The title of the piece is inspired by the “laplace demon” – a thought experiment describing a model using total determination. This is to evoke the question of how a system of this complexity is totally reproducible – which it is not in this case. The concept of the piece is a very structured progression of about 100 scenes, which are clearly defined – but within these cells there is a great amount of freedom for the performer on a micro level.

Don’t miss the part 2, there is some very very intense stuff …