
Show HN: MidiPad 2 – A customizable Midi Pad Controller - thedjinn
http://midipadapp.com/
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goodgood
You shouldn't advertise your site the day you register your domain. Filters
like WebSense block new domains. I've seen this happen multiple times here.

I wonder if there's a correlation between a domain name's age, and the HN rank
of posts that link to them.

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divenorth
Interesting that you use motion sensors to create midi velocity. How accurate
is that?

Any reason for not adding midi sliders and knobs too? Most MIDI apps include
those and are used by many composers/musicians.

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thedjinn
The accuracy is a trade-off between latency and precision. The touch event
arrives as soon as you touch the screen, but the actual force of your touch
still needs a few milliseconds to actually put the device into motion. Waiting
a little bit while collecting measurements gives you quite an accurate
indication of the force used, but the increased latency makes it harder to
play.

Sliders and knobs will be added in a future version. I wanted to put an MVP on
the app store first before adding additional features.

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dwringer
Sliders and knobs are one thing, but this format really invites the use of XY
controllers where sliding a finger in the x-dimension modulates one parameter,
while the y-dimension modulates another. I am certain more complex schemes
should be possible, especially given the possibilities of multi-touch input. I
would love to see something like this included.

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pampa
Velocity sensitive pads on a touch screen? Wow, didnt know this was possible.

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mikewhy
Garage Band for iOS did it on release back in 2011. Using the accelerometer
it's possible to simulate some sort of velocity.

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thedjinn
Exactly. The general idea is that you get a measurement of the applied force,
so integrating that value gives you an approximate velocity.

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mikewhy
Assuming you worked on the app based on your other replies. Is 3D Touch
applicable here?

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thedjinn
Yes, that works. However, you would be facing the same problems. You can read
out the pressure of a touch but the initial pressure is not the strongest
since the finger is still in motion. Additionally, 3D touch is not supported
on all devices.

Another interesting thing is that there are also private APIs for reading out
the estimated finger size of a touch. This can give you even more information
to determine the velocity from, as light touches are usually done with the
fingertips.

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brokenmachine
Only on ios.

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squarefoot
Android has no chance of competing in the MIDI/Music field: choosing Java was
an ill decision because of the huge latencies its poor performance imposes,
which makes any serious Music application plain impossible. Google promised a
low latency Android years ago which as predicted by many of us they didn't
deliver: that would require rewriting entire layers of the OS from scratch
migrating them from Java to C++ just to make some music freaks happy. Just no
way.

