Wednesday, February 28, 2007

STC-1000

Another promising device, a pressure-sensitive Kaoss Pad without the audio circuitry or flashing lights. Elegant design. Has MIDI but no USB - less convenient but it is guaranteed to be standard compliant (kinda...)

When I received the unit in the mail, I eagerly hooked it into GDAM, dumped the MIDI, and made a binding file linking the MIDI signals to some effect parameters. But playing with it, something was not right... instead of sending straight X/Y/Z (pressure) coordinates, it sent relative values! This may help to adjust parameters smoothly, but it prevents the obvious application of tapping the center of the X axis to get 50% on parameter, far left to get 0%, etc. Again, relative motion with different levels of sensitivity, soft pickup, and all kinds of other behaviour would have been possible in standard software if they had just sent the pure XYZ coordinates as CC or Pitch Wheel (touchscreen resolution is greater than 7 bit CC value).

The company promised applications for configuing the unit, and the pure coordinates were packed into MIDI sysex data, but as I had no immediate need for the controller I didn't write a driver. Judging by the response to my post to their message board, and other posts, I was far from the only person disappointed by this. When I visited their site recently they seemed to provide software for programming the unit.

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