My experiments with the TouchOSC app for both the iPad and iPhone have brought me back around to Cycling74 MaxMSP 5. Of all of the methods of controlling Reason and Record via open sound control, routing OSC messages directly into the MaxMSP rewire object have proven to be most responsive. This process uses MaxMSP as a Rewire host application with Record or Reason launched in Rewire Slave Mode. OSC messages are then routed directly rather than being converted to MIDI messages which are routed through the system back into the applications.

The archive contains templates for both the iPad and iPhone which can be installed using the TouchOSC editor. These templates have a 16 button interface with a MPC pad style layout with a velocity slider. These are included in the following archive:

TouchOSCReason-RecordRewire.zip

The TouchOSC templates are designed to work specifically with either of the two Rewire host patches, TouchOSC-ReasonRWHost.mxf for Reason and TouchOSC-RecordRWHost.mxf for Record. These patches require the free MaxMSP runtime that you can download from from Cycling74’s Website: http://cycling74.com/downloads/

The patch is fairly self-explanatory: there are fields for setting the local host port (typically 8000 for TouchOSC), the iPhone/iPad IP address and Port (typ. 9000). These should be set according to your network configuration and TouchOSC settings. A basic implementation of bidirectional data is incorporated in the patch, so all settings are important.

A numeric field for entering the song tempo, and rudimentary transport controls for playback. The “zero” button sets the transport back to the start position. Finally a button labelled “Propellerhead Reason” (or Record), when pressed, will set the display on the iPad or iPhone.

The patch cannot be customized in the way you can with OSCulator. The 16 buttons and velocity slider generate note messages which are sent directly to the rewire object. It’s designed for speed, not for flexibility, so there are several drawbacks to this configuration. The note mappings cannot be modified. The patch controls the tempo and defeats the songs native tempo as well as any tempo automation. Tempo and port settings cannot be saved. Despite these issues, the response is very fast and more suitable for real time midi event input.

I’ve tested this on MacOS, but not the Windows runtime. I would appreciate any feedback from Windows users. If this runs as expected, then you should be able to bypass MIDI Yoke. Once I get everything worked out flawlessly, i’ll post the maxpat files.

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