Touch Screen monitors and Reaktor

Does anyone have experience with touch screens for use with Reaktor? Model/brand recommendations etc.
Are Resistive better than Capacitive? Is the touch resolution accurate enough for small knobs etc.
Any advice would be welcome.

 

This is something I would also be very interested in hearing more about. I've been considering getting a touch screen for Reaktor for a while now, but I have no clue what to look for.

 

Dell Latitude XT

Hi guys, I am using a Dell Latitude XT for exactly this purpose. After reading quite a lot of negative reviews about this laptop, I had the chance to borrow a friend's one for a few days and found that the problems people had been experiencing were largely due to user error and driver conflicts. I saw a cheap refurbished one on ebay and pounced.

Anyhow, all that aside, using a touchscreen with reaktor is absolutely great. Not just for performance and music programming, but for the editing and creation of ensembles.

Certainly it allows for a MUCH faster, more fluid music making experience (much closer to the feeling of playing a real instrument than with just mouse.)

That being said there are a few things that need to be modified and gotten used to. The first thing I did was to take the ensembles I use most often and make everything on the panels MUCH BIGGER!

All the knobs, faders, XY pads and event tables, pretty much everything was supersized until i filled the screen. (Obviously the most important parameters took precedence, and some were even dropped from the panel alltogether)
Due to the added size I also made more use of the A and B pages. After enlarging everything it made sense to have 2 pages that could be switched between with a quick tap, rather than scrolling which is to be avoided at all costs. After a few trial and error jobs I found what made sense to me and was able to apply that layout fairly intuitively to all my favourite beasts.

As an example with sequenced beat machines I usually have a full page dedicated to the event table for "drawing" in beats and a second page for the synths, mixer and effects.

The Dell is dual touch enabled meaning that you can use finger input or a pen but to be honest I find myself reaching for the pen most of time for its added accuracy. I think on a larger screen exclusive finger input would make more sense, but I do still use my finger at least some of the time.

For me the touchscreen makes the reaktor experience MUCH faster and I would highly reccomend it to anyone thinking about it.
The Jazzmutant lemur is really nice and all,(a couple close friends have them) but for a quarter of the price I think I got at least 75% of the functionality, without the headaches and hours of OSC programming...AND my new box is a dual core machine capable of actually driving reaktor, leaving my macbook free to run logic or for Ableton live loopfoolery.

If anyone is in doubt, go to a computer store that has some tablets and bring the demo of reaktor on a thumbdrive with some ensembles and fire it up. GoBox or the DSQ64 are pretty good as out of the box testers to get an idea.

Hope that helps.

 

Touch Screens

Thanks for the response. OK that tells me that touch screens
have issues with resolution which I suspected. Good to hear that you can get satisfactory results though.
I am going to see if I can get the Wii remote thing going.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii
This will allow for a much bigger control surface which hopefully
will mean that ensembles won't have to be re sized.
I just got my wii remote and now I need a projector and infared LED pen.

 

The wiimote multi-touch looks wicked. I had considered it as a possibility but was looking for something a bit more instant to get my hands wet so to speak. Please keep us updated about your results. I would love to know how it works out.

Cheers

 

I am more interested in seperate touch screens actually, rather than tablet pcs. Does anyone have any recommendations in this area?

 

im using the wiimote to do this

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVfDBRVnndE"]YouTube - touch wall beta test reaktor[/ame]

it also works right on the screen. you could make any screen into a touch screen. im using the osx version of he wiimote whiteboard software to translate the mouse click.

 

hey robot sound thats wicked,but what ensemble are you using
i really like the sound,is it in the UL , would be cool upload,

the ens on the left looks like terx, what is the right ens

 

drox

both are by julien

X-Y stuff really works on a touch screen

 

Bluetooth adapter

Which bluetooth adapter are you using?
I bought a D-link DBT-122 and the freaking thing connects
to the wii but when I try to launch whiteboard it can't find it or gives me an error. I downloaded all the updates a did everything
it says on the wiiproject site but still no satisfaction.

 

its the built in adaptor on my power book. Nothing connects to the Wii. Just the WiiMote. Try using the JAVA version of the wiimote whiteboard. That one seems to work for me better than the native osx version.