Beat juggling (literally) with reacTIVision:



I could amuse myself with this for days.

Here's an article about the setup

This week I started experimenting with reacTIVision, part of the reacTable* project. ReacTIVision is the object tracking engine, the synthesis and visual feedback portions of reacTable are not open source. The new version of reacTIVision, 1.3, contains a MIDI server with a very flexible configuration scheme. This allows easy mapping of controllers in applications like Ableton Live that don't support OSC, the protocol that reacTIVision has traditionally served.

Here's a quick demo video of reacTIVision controlling Live 6. It's not much of a performance, but you can see the potentential.

I've made some changes to the MIDI server to allow smooth CC interpolation, variable CC quantization, and some statefulness to stop redundant CC messages. This has made the MIDI functionality a bit more music-friendly and reduced the MIDI traffic significantly. Martin's reacTIVision code is very elegant - I'm a novice C++ programmer, but was able to dive right in and start working.

I'm hoping to develop an configurable visual feedback engine along the lines of reacTable that is geared toward controlling applications like Live, Traktor, Reaktor, etc.

Microsoft has proclaimed that Vista will be the most secure operating system ever. Revolutionary features like virtual filesystem roots for users and applications, allowing applications to run with restricted priveleges, and the ability to access tools that require administrator rights by supplyng that admin password on a per use basis rather then having to log out and log in as the Administrator user are noted as answers to todays complex security needs.

Somewhere, Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie are having a big laugh over this.

Firefox version 0.9 is out. Get it. Use it. Love it.