Android Touch OSC and Ardour

Seeing as you cannot create new layouts on the Android version of Touch OSC, I took it upon myself to create a puredata to patch to convert the OSC commands of the default layouts to things that Ardour will understand. I have used the Mix 16 layout. The first page controls the transport and the master channel, the second and third pages control faders and muting of each individual track. If you have any problems please report back. Make sure you are sending OSC to pd on port 9001.
Only tested with pd-extended on Ubuntu 11.10

http://www.christiegrinham.co.uk/misc/TouchArdour.pd

I took a look at the TouchOSC files before, going off memory they are standard ZIPped XML files, so it would be easy enough to create a new layout by hand for Ardour.

Of course that being said, I intend to give ardroid a run here before to long and see how that does, not real sure what it’s capabilities are.

  Seablade

The layout editor works for android but as far as I can tell, there is no way to get the layouts in to the android app.

That you may need to repackage the app for, can’t remember the details when I went through this with someone over IRC. It may have been that they had their device rooted to load up new layouts(though they may have overwritten the ‘stock’ layouts) I didn’t have an android device at the time so I couldn’t do more than give them help in doing it themselves, and that was a few months back at least.

     Seablade

I made the mistake of purchasing the touchOSC app a while back, for iPhone (my only concession to apple ‘i’ devices so far) with the intention of controlling Ardour with it, but have subsequently never used it. I discovered that it was impossible to edit the configuration from within the app (this may have changed with later versions, but likely my iOS / Hardware is now too old to upgrade) and the only way I could see to get new configurations onto the device was to use some Mac-only application / iTunes combination. While it would have been possible to construct a translation application on linux to make it work (I also subsequently discovered this would be necessary anyway, just to get the OSC data into ardour) at that point I considered it such a horrible mess I gave up the idea. In my opinion, an application like that should be configurable within the app itself, and not require another wobbly stack of custom pd or scripting / translation to get it working. I guess I should have researched it more before I bought it, but I assumed a configurable app designed to control OSC devices would allow me to… er… control OSC devices (without having to manually edit files, create custom translation scripts / applications, (optionally) jailbreak the device, buy a Mac etc etc). Disappointing as it looked like it would be the ideal application for what I needed. I’ve still yet to find a convenient touch based remote control system for Ardour (or other DAWs) - and unfortunately I don’t have the time to write one at the moment…

Yeah on iOS you have to create the layout on the computer and then sync it on to the iPhone. This isn’t available on android. It’s not a particularly elegant solution, but it does allow me to do exactly what I’ve wanted to do for ages. They could have easily designed the program so that you could long-click on a control object and change the command it sends… Sadly I don’t have any programming experience to write my own android app, so this is the best I can do.

@christophski: Yeah I didn’t mean to appear critical of your solution - I was critical of the app in as much as if they’d designed it a little better then that sort of solution would not be necessary, which would remove another complication and in the process, be more elegant. But what you’ve provided is a means to get it working, which I guess is for many people what really matters.

If I can ever find the time I’d be interested to look at Android more closely with a view to getting some kind of a remote control app working… eventually…

@linuxdsp

Someone already started working on one in fact, thus my mentioning of Ardroid above;) Check in Ardour’s SVN.

Seablade

@seablade I noticed ardroid’s presence on mantis yesterday but couldn’t for the life of me work out what it was, thanks :stuck_out_tongue: However, the svn says it hasn’t been touched in 8 months :confused:

@linuxdsp: if you did create an android app, I wouldn’t mind paying a couple of quid for it, it would be a great solution, as long as it was customisable.

Ardroid is on the Market, if OSC has not changed in the latest releases it should still work. You need a Wifi connection and start the OSC remote in Ardour. Ardroid will then sync up with the current session.

Found the ardroid app, have to search for ardour as it doesn’t appear under ardroid for some reason. I also found another app called Control (OSC + Midi) which is like TouchOSC but allows for custom layouts on android. However, there is no graphical layout editor, you have to write it by hand. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.charlieroberts.Control