MIDI Machine Control (MMC) Fun

This has been a great week. After a quick and brief brainstorming, I decided to implement some basic MIDI Machine Control (MMC) support into Qtractor. This covered the basic transport functions and, most notably, it changed the Rewind and Fast-Forward actions behavior, now resembling the tape-recorder paradigm. Or sort of.

I must confess that all the grunt work was mostly cut-and-pasting my own code which I contributed to the us428control tool from ALSA. As I don't have no access to the official MIDI specification which seems to be only available in print and through direct order, I had to take the meanwhile alternative but always valuable path of that great resource as is the MIDI Technical Fanatic's Brainwashing Center. A bare and basic specification of this MMC thing can be found there.

So who was about to harness this new thing? No one else than my young 5-year old, who went through his best efforts on pushing the buttons and wheels of a Tascam US-224, serving both as an Audio/MIDI laptop USB interface and as a DAW control surface. Taking from the pictured photo, you can guess that fun was not an afterthought and the new implementation was awarded with a smiling stamp of approval.

On other news, I am proud to announce that my paper submission to the approaching LAC2007@TU-Berlin was kindly accepted and that just makes The Road to Berlin straight ahead now. Let's get moving.

CVS version tag of the day is nothing less than 0.0.1.549.