Adapt clip launcher/cue-view so it is better adapted for touch screens

[ittb]

Hi there! Although I posted this already as a feature request (see 0009267: Adapt button functionality for clip launcher/cue-view so it is better adapted for touch screens - MantisBT ) I thought it a good idea to get some community feedback on it (sorry for double posting).

Thus I will describe a little bit broader what the idea is: primarily I am a piano player (using pianoteq) but I am sometimes also in song creation (very rarely published to avoid copyright conflicts). Several times I came across live clip launching/recording sessions on youtube (I think using ableton live) and this would some kind of music making I would like to experiment with.

As my hardware now is a brandnew HP x360 touch laptop 13.3" oled (running happily fedora 37) one of my first thoughts when seeing Paul Davis presenting clip launcher functionality with an external launch pad was, how extremely cool would it be to make this kind of session directly on the touch screen of my laptop. However the “launching” functionality is assigned to a small triangle whereas the larger button area holding the clip name is nearly without function (acts as “select”). My feature idea thus would be to swap functionality: select goes to the triangle (or an other small icon) and the large button area should be “launch”/“play”.

General I find it a very appealing idea to support touch screens as a low level and portable user interface. The cue-view could maybe go into this direction and nevertheless keep up to professional needs.

What do you think? Am I quite exotic with this requirement?

Thanks to all

ittb

[BenLoftis (Ben)]

I agree that the current window layout is not great for live triggering on-the-fly. The mouse targets are very small.

The current page is optimized for loading clips, editing their properties, and sound-design (plugins and mixing) purposes, rather than on-the-fly launching.

I don’t think you can simply ‘swap the buttons’ because the very small vertical height of the selection area will still limit the usability on a touchscreen. Instead I think we should consider a separate page that is optimized for live triggering, with large-ish square buttons. Perhaps this page would look very similar to a launchpad or Push device. Theoretically it could even respond to multiple touches.

For now, the best way to access triggering via multitouch is to use the TouchOSC remote tablet software. I’ve added clip-launching to the OSC remote-control API, and developed a simple TouchOSC template to access those clip launching features:

ardour

Here’s a .gif of the touchosc interface in action.

-Ben

[THM (Thomas)]

IMHO this also might be a great option for the Web Sockets interface.

[ittb]

@BenLoftis , @THM : thanks for your encouraging feedback! I am currently aftk. The idea with touchOSC sounds very interesting.