This makes so much sense! Looking at this I feel like this is what I've been Actually wanting from the moment they announced the NTS-1 I just didn't know it
@polotek It's a little handheld synthesizer / guitar-pedal-like audio filter, but it has two interesting features:
In addition to the builtin filters/synths, you can upload your own C plugins you wrote yourself.
It has a two-dimensional touch surface, like a trackpad. (The previous version had only a 1-D touch strip.) Korg's previously shown you can do really expressive performance stuff with a 2D touch surface like this wired to an audio filter. And now you can run it with your own code
@mcc@polotek it seems interesting that phones / pads haven’t fulfilled such a need. It could be interesting to understand why?
I can imagine a whole bunch of reasons why a specific device would be far superior, like good tooling for home coding, distinct physical controls, the right io ports for other music gear, physical robustness, other os shit getting in the way, systematic attention to latency requirements… wonder if any of those are it?
@benjohn@polotek for a huge number of people phones have fulfilled such a need. There is a large ecosystem of music production apps and dongles on iOS.
as someone who has done development on both phone platforms as well as embedded music devices however, phones don't fulfill my needs because:
Apple doesn't let you control what you can do. They put you in a tiny confining box at all times.
Android is difficult and unpleasant to develop for, and they lack a high quality audio subsystem
@benjohn@polotek I'll also note all the phone stuff I've seen is music production. I've seen much less of phone apps for live music performance. I'd suspect this is because phones are bad at "kiosking". If you're performing, you can't accept your phone turning off, or a notification interrupting the performance, or your music app quitting because you accidentally input a switch app gesture. I think iPad has a "kiosk mode" now but I don't know what it does and also, I don't use Apple.
@mcc@polotek I didn’t know about the kiosk thing. That all makes a lot of sense! Thank you for explaining. … I like the ideas of performance tools rather than production / composition tools. I’d noticed that it’s pretty different thing and it appeals to me more, I think.
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