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Re: Foot Controllers.

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 12:36 AM, Mark Hamburg <mhamburg.pub@gmail.com> 
wrote:
> Then one needs software that can map those four events (Press, Hold, 
> TapRelease, HoldRelease) into MIDI events.


Good news: Not necessary if you use MIDI Notes! :-)  That is because
MIDI Note data includes the two events Note On and Note Off.
Translated into pressing a foot pedal switch the Note On corresponds
to when you press down the switch and the Note Off corresponds to when
you let go of the foot-down press. In the Mobius looper a lot of
long-press support is already set up as default, but you can do more
with it if scripting.

For software loopers that are lacking long-press support, I guess one
could use MIDI Pipe just like you described, Mark. One would then tell
MIDI pipe to measure the time between a Note On and its Note Off and
if that time is longer than... let's say 1500 milliseconds (that's
what I use in my Gordius pedal for long-press stuff) it sends
something else. I'm not certain MIDI Pipe can do exactly that, but for
anyone reading this that is interested it would be just a five minutes
task to check out by the manual or web page.

There is something about long-press commands that I found out about
"the hard way": that you better use it combined with pretty safely
quantised commands, rather than together with real-time actions. Most
folks like actions like "Next Loop" to happen a bit into the future,
like "on the next loop round" or in my case I prefer it to be executed
"on the next cycle cusp" (a cycle normally being one or two bars. That
gives you the time to press down a switch long enough.

Another good combo is to use the Note Off event for the 1st command,
because then you are avoiding that critical time window as this Note
Off can only happen earlier or later than 1500 milliseconds after the
Note On. For example assigning UNDO to Note Off and REDO to long-press
(another fav of mine). That allows you to instantly while playing
"scroll up and down the edits history" as they call it in Photoshop
:-)

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.perboysen.com
http://www.youtube.com/perboysen