Idea: Web app generating TouchOSC projects

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Ok so this is not a module, but it’s something I think we might find useful as a community collab.

Web app generating TouchOSC projects

TouchOSC is a €/$5 touch app turning your Android or iDevice into a customizable OSC controller, with bidirectional controls.

It works well with MIDI-CAT, not perfectly reliable for all uses but still good enough, there’s latency & things get desync’d a bit sometimes. I’ve seen multiple other VCV users using it in the past. (Here’s an example of my playing VCV via TouchOSC)

TouchOSC has a layout editor but… it’s quite a pain to use. And sharing layouts is difficult, because you can’t share pages individually, so you can’t just, say, import a page that maps Fundamental’s SEQ-3, and have it work without a lot of fiddling in the editor with copy-pasting and changing MIDI ports and channels.

But underneath all that complexity, TouchOSC layouts are just zipped XML files, and MIDI-CAT’s mappings are just JSON, whether saved as preset or as .vcv project.

Thus, it’d be possible to create a client-side javascript app that simply automates it for users. It’d work as follows:

  • We make a repository of TouchOSC layouts and corresponding MIDI-CAT mappings, each of them mapping a single module, mapped to a standard orientation (vertical matches most modules layouts better, horizontal is much more commonly used - this would have to be debated first) and standard aspect ratio (TouchOSC is scalable, 16:9 seems safe).
  • The user selects which devices they want mapped, in which order, and optionally, the internal moduleId of the devices.
  • The app produces:
    • A single .touchosc zipped XML file with every requested page, using channels and ports economically
    • A .vcv project with all the devices in question already mapped to one or multiple MIDI-CAT
    • Optionally, a set of .vcvm presets for MIDI-CAT with the devices in question already mapped to the provided moduleId, so you can add a controller to an existing project
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Oh, I see this post has been split off from the “Module Ideas” thread, heh. I should clarify it was originally posted there, it’s not something I (currently) plan to make, just something I thought about.

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I have been thinking along similar lines but lack the skills to easily write the scripts. I’m currently stuck at just trying to automate the decoding and encoding of the base64 in the TouchOSC files to allow bulk editing of names.

I’ve been in discussion with the author at Hexler though and he says he currently has an entirely new editor in process which will be released very soon and which will hopefully address the issues that users have had with it over the years and make the reusing of tabpages and groups of objects much simpler (not that any of this mitigates against an automated solution).

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Oh neato! Nice to hear. And it’s also quite possible someone will make a great OSC device, obsoleting the other part of the app.

I should have the skills to do that kinda app myself, but it’s a ton of effort for something that might not get used at all. With TouchOSC being a paid app, most people won’t want to buy it unless they know they won’t have to also create layouts themselves.