The Traktor and the iPad - Control Redefined

If you told me 6 or 8 weeks ago that I would buy an iPad 3G I would have have have told you you were on Crack. Yet here I set with a shiny new iPad 3G on my lap. You will have to forgive the egotistical snobbery of the statement and the blatant fanboi-ism, for the moment at least. This post is not about "look what I've got" its about lets see what touch control does for DJing... Its not about bring back touch wikky-wikky-wik to digital DJing. There are plenty of solutions laying around for that, Serato, Scratch Pro Ms Pinky have all been here and do what they do really well. This is about the one area that a lot of DJ controllers do, but all miss the mark a little or a lot in one way or another. For the last 4 years we've seen a relelentless assault by DJ controllers all bringing one or two positives to the table but few if any are willing to learn from what everyone else has learnt and built the ultimate controller, in no small part because its an $1,800.00 - $3,000 item and the hardware controller is only good while the app it controls stays the same. After that all bets are off.

Until now, no one has built a touch screen controller that is worth a damn or is affordable. I include the lemur in that statement because as good as it is (and it is good) its too expensive for the mid level consumer DJ market. The iPad is not a mid-level DJ controller on its own, but with the addition of some inexpensive software it can become the player other controllers will have to match up to. As good as it is, touch control on an iPod suffers from size issues. It has all the functionality but it just too damn small to be effective for a broad range of controls. Touch on the iPod while good is a little tweaky. When the iPad was released Steve Jobs went to great pains to make much of the improvements in the touch control responsiveness and my first thoughts were great skepticism. I've seen and heard bucket loads of claims over the last 15 years about "this is it this is the one... touch done right". All so far have been incremental improvements and mostly small improvements at that. iPad breaks that mold. It won't go so far as to say its the Jesus machine of touch UIs but its a significant improvement over whats out there right now and that makes it a good usability yard stick.

Now lets bring in TouchOSC, an iPad / iPod app that gives you a customizable touch surface to control your favorite MIDI enabled app like Traktor or Ableton. It does it in ways similar to the Jazz Mutant Lemur but at a price point that makes the application entirely accessible to mid level consumers. In reality the easiest way to make it work today is in the Mac World with OSCULATOR and Control Editor for TouchOSC, you build the UI for the way you work. When your application gets redesigned 3 months after you buy the iPad and software, simply craft a new template and layout to work with the new application and you don't have an expensive pile of hardware that sorta works with your DJ application.

There are going to be challenges in getting this setup to an ideal point. I do not think this first release will make the iPad the Jesus Machine for DJ's, at least not yet. Those that do use it though are going to be WAY WAY ahead of the competition in terms of controller capabilities.
For my part, I was working with a friend to design a touch control system for Traktor and when the iPad announced we put the design efforts on hold, until we got to see whether combining existing software with the iPad would yield a usable controller. We have not made that final decision to terminate life support but based upon what we know already we essentially have done so already.

The hard part is done, the fun part remains; build, test, refine, rinse, repeat. For the past 3 years or so I've toyed with buying a mixer with MIDI capabilities. I have actually had a Xone 92, Korg 04 and DJM800 to try out and only the 04 was close enough to usable to give me serious must-own lust. The next few weeks will tell me whether it was worth waiting for the next evolution in control. Giddee-up!

 

Damn you beat me to it. I'm grabbing an iPad soon myself, with TouchOSC slated for installation. How do you like the 3G functionality? I'm probably just gonna go wifi with mine.

 

I would have gotten the wifi unit if someone had them for sale. I'm still getting used to the iPad but so far I like, mennee goodness is iPAD! Lotta money to spend though.

Touch control response on the iPad much better than the iPod no doubt due to larger object sizes and scaling factors but also due to improved sensitivity as well.

Check out the Pic

Phil

 

After my Maschine this will be my next purchase. I'm actually slated to get a new iPhone too.

 

looks like i could just as well get a touchscreen monitor or a stanton scs

 

You could get a touchscreen but then you have to write all the application stuff yourself. By itself the touchscreen with drivers will not give you touch screen controllable Traktor.

Phil

 

I've got a friend working on this stuff and he does all the "software" I/O control using Max/MSP. However, most of the "cheap" multitouch screens use a technology which is not good for accurate controls.

 

Yeah quite right. Postioning is not a problem we found positional accuracy to be low, around 3 pixels when we were testing general window touch hardware for our own design, but timewise the the standard drivers varied wildly in their latency from just over 460Msec down to about 35. It depended on the gesture too as to the response time. We had thught we would need to rewrite the controller drivers. You have to be careful about the interface chipset too, response times are affected greatly. New HP touchsmarts have a good chipset, very fast, but we had real trouble trying to hack into its drivers. By contrast the gen 1 touchsmart systems were slllloooooowwww but you could readily extend the drivers. If you wanna go really fast, HID into Traktor would be the way to go, I suspect that getting NI to give up the keys to that particular castle so we could write the extensions would have been next to impossible. Without a doubt going in through OSC-MIDI is the way to go and the only usable way in windows (IMO at least) is with MAX/MSP. I'm gonna do my designs and test in OSX, then will port to windows. Its MUCH MUCH cleaner and more stable.

BTW FWIW, first looks at iPad response times are a consistent 17-22 Msec. Too slow for scratching but very respectable for beatmatching and mashups. Adding MIDI translator into the mix to convert absolute into relative outputs adds about 5-15 MSecs. This is with stock settings and we found with careful tuning in OSX we could get 5-10 MSec improvements in performance in most cases.

 

Some further thoughts and findings on the iPad in general.

App Stability in general.
Pretty good but I have had Safari Crash the You Tube app crash and the appstore app crash several times expanding app descriptions and most notably mail crashes. It seems to be worse when you select a large number of emails to retain (200) and there are already lots of people complaing about this since the wifi version release at the beginning of the month. Apple have been dead silent on all the reported crash conditions as they tend to do. I suspect we'll have to live with these bugs until June when the 4.0 O/S ships. I cannot imagine that these problems were not discovered in testing prior to release its just a matter of priorities and hitting the ship dates. In this case the lack of software quality is glaringly obvious.

Network wise the unit is pretty damn fast. 3G so far, has been great I'll be watching my usage over about 3 months and may step down to the cheaper plan if my bandwidth stays low. I expect I'll use the heck out of it for the first month or two. Wireless N WIFI works well although I have yet to play around with Video much. Does anyone know if a DNLA app exists for the iPhone / iPad. I've looked briefly but found nothing.

Battery charging is slow 4 hours to go from 68% to 100%. Consumption wise I expect continuous 3G and video will wipe out the battery in 4-6 hours, maybe less. Continuous 3G use over 2 hours sucked the battery down to 70% from full. Connection free the unit will probably get 8 - 10 hours with straight browsing.
You can be sure that once Multi-tasking comes to town, battery life will be abysmal.

The lack of Flash is a MAJOR PITA and Steve Jobs is doing little to endear himself to his user-base of iPhone iPod Touch and now iPod users by pulling a Nancy (just say NO). The spat between Apple and Adobe really only hurts consumers but more and more people will defer purchasing the iPad because of the incapability of the product. I've read Steve Job arguments against Flash and there is merit in what he says about app stability. But that is laughable when you look at current iPad app stability. Steve needs to get his own house in order before calling others out. If Steve thinks for a moment that he will have any substantial effect on HTML 5.0adoption by forcing the flash issue here, he is grossly over-estimating his real power in the market. Apple simply lacks the overall market-share world-wide to greatly accelerate the change to HTML 5.0, it will certainly give it a decent shove along but it will continue to take time as the other 85+% of the market come around and warm to HTML 5.0 design. If Steve is truly resistant to Flash on iPad iPhone iPods then we should expect a diminished user experience for at least 2 years. If, as I expect this is, is just gamesmanship on Steves part to force Adobe into being the lesser bully, then we'll likely get Flash and not too far away. Expect app stability to diminish somewhat and usage to skyrocket as a result. That is sure to make AT&T nervous especially in areas where their networks are already overtaxed.

right its nearly time to go shopping... Some iPad essentials to buy this weekend.
iPad Wrap - To protect its surface
Slip Case - Something to protect it when I'm carrying it around.
Dock - Somewhere easy to plug in and charge it. I don't need the dock and keyboard... yet.. if at all.
Cleaning Cloth - Yeah those greasy fingers do make a mess on the screen

Phil

 

Got my first real opportunity to program up a mixer strip in the editor tonight. Control truly feels like silk. It is soooo far ahead of what we built programmed earlier in windows its not even funny. Its smooth, responsive, very precise and not at all jittery. So far I'm EXTREMELY impressed, now granted I've only programmed one complete channel of the mixer but so far I am extremely happy to have ditched our original hardware design for the iPad. "Touch OSC on iPad rulez" would be my initial assessment. Its a night and day improvement over the iPod control too. If you liked that you'll truly love / lust for this.

Phil

 

Phil can you explain a bit more how TouchOSC works for you in practice? (I've read about it on Engadget and looked at their website.)

Do you fear drop-outs since the data is send over Wi-Fi?

How is latency when the wireless connection is good?

 

I was certainly concerned with dropouts at first when I was running it on my iPod but like all things once you get get used to the product and it proves itself to be stable then you become less worried and just get on with doing what you do. I have only had one occasion where I had a dropout and some smartarse put his smartphone right beside my laptop and when it transmitted everything dropped wireless sound, the whole lot luckily when I heard the chirp and saw the screen shimmer I knew what it was and simply picked his phone up and threw it backward over my shoulder. The stupid arsed grin disappeared really fast on the smart arse, thinking his phone was busted. but it landed on my laptop bag behind me so he was safe. When I play on the iPad, I'm going to build a full mixer layout that supports all the mixer functions that tractor has Xone EQs, kills, filters, gain, xfader assign, channel monitor select, xfader.
Once I have that down I'll move onto loops jumps and a much better hot cue and loop setting method. I tested the loop last night it work slick as snot. Nuff said on that for now.

For a start though I wanna prove this system works well enough to truly be called a full featured mini mixer. There are a bunch of usability challenges to solve and layout tricks to learn as I go first.

Phil

 

thanks for the info! i look forward to an update once you've got everything set up and tested...

 

We'll a week with the iPad beast leaves me happy with the purchase but more convinced that ever that it ain't no Jesus machine. Those claiming its replacing their laptops are dreaming. I would come back to them in 4-6 months to see what the state of play is then.

On the TouchOSC front I have the mixer built, the OSC patch created and the controller map for Traktor built. TouchOSC is stable and the system has not malfunctioned at all but I've hardly begun to test it. some things I've learned so far.
Rotary controls especially small rotarys are next to impossible to control accurately with hefty fat stubby fingers like mine. the smallest rotary control I've see so far that works worth a damn is 110 pixels about 28mm wide. Pin buttons (really skinny ones like used for EQ kills etc that are 25pixels or smaller are really harder and slow to actuate.
TouchOSC has has really good adjacent touch separation in that if you have two fader close together and you activate on but as you adjust it you drift your finger over the other fader it does not activate. It will if you touch and drag on it with a second finger.
The faders and knobs are little jittery when adjusting them when outputs are feeding back to the iPad. This is a common problem of a sort of feedback loop. I think there are improvements that can be made in traktor because I see the jitter in Many othet controllers that support outs and ins. TouchOSC can help too I think in this area.
Power use is fine I was on battery 6 hours on Thursday with Touch OSC running and connected by Wifi always, almost continuously and only consumed about 18% of the battery. I was initially concerned about battery life but since turning down the screen brightness to about 1/3, battery consumption rates have gone WWWWAAAAAYYYYY way way way down.
I did get the invisible shield screen cover put on yesterday I'm on the fence on the subject of change to tacticle response and sensitivity. It definitely makes the unit easier to grip with less slip feel when you pick it up with the film on.

Gonna try running a full mix set on it along with the two X1's later today. that should be interesting...

 

Just thought I would chime in and say thanks for taking to time to test this out, PhilL. I'm very excited to see what the iPad can do. Cheers.

 

Updated: Attached is a 100% image of the mixer layout. The first pic I posted was with the default 2 channel layout that comes with TouchOSC, so I can neither take credit nor blame for that 2 channel version. Mine is 4 channel mixer and presently very pedestrian in design but it plays beautifully although latency feels quite high, possibly in the 50-200 Msec range.

The editor view gives a cleaner view but its static so I'll take a couple of camera pics too.

The first image is a 100% render of the mixer on the ipad the screen is right on 7 3/4 x 5 3/4 inches or 197 x 148 mm so if you want to get feel for actual size you can adjust the image size on screen till you get those dimensions. Its no point giving you the sizes in pixels as they are only relative to to the monitor you are on and the pixel size on that monitor. I've got a few minor changes to the layout but for the most part the layout for the mixer is done. That top grey area in the image is acually the section for page changes and TouchOSC multiple pages. Most layouts I've seen have 3 but I've heard of 5 or 7. For now I'm gonna move onto a prototype for the entire deck transport I have two thoughts there one large one with deck select buttons and one with 4 decks represented. I'm gonna do the latter first because then I have all the OSC - MIDI mappings done up front for all decks and later controller map construction in Traktor will be faster.

Phil

 

Yeah figured that was the TouchOSC layout. I actually like that layout but i agree that the knobs are hard to work.

Have you been able to label the buttons. Thats what i liked about the iTMatrix app for the iPhone.

 

Not yet but I will get to it.

Phil

 

I own a XONE 4D, and at the moment it does everything i need, with a seemingly endless amount of MIDI controls available, i just cant fault it. I live in the UK so cant get an IPAD until the end of the month, but am seriously interested in getting one as an addition to my DJ setup. I've played with some out of the box loop sequencer apps on my IPhone and love the idea of performances with a larger screen. I think the DJ can now really get involved in live performances doesn't matter whether they is behind the booth or in the crowd. Its not just about beat-matching and lining up records anymore. I think we are at the start of a new live DJ Performance revolution.
1990-2000: House & Trance, Vinyl & CDJ's.
2000-2010: Electro, House & Minimal, CDJ's & Software.
The next decade? I don't know but I'm really looking forward to it

 

check this out.....

Two things come to mind "holy crap thats busy" and "just because ya can doesn't mean ya should..."

It works and looks good but I'm not too keen on it... it just too crowded. As a learning exercise though it was extremely valuable.