Thu 9 Nov 2006
My First ‘Real’ Application! Virtual BCF2000 Midi Controller
Posted by SteamSHIFT under Cocoa , Developing , Geek , Mac , Quartz Composer , VJ
Ever since I started using a BCF2000 midi controller for my visual experiments with Quartz Composer, I have been left with the problem of having to carry the controller around with me if I want to do any work with my patches; which makes it all rather less portable. The answer; a virtual BCF2000.
I put this to my friend Joe and we began work; here is the fruit of that labour:- I proudly present the Virtual BCF2000. It is built using Cocoa.
There are a few things you need to know:-
- It requires MidiPipe or similar; this is because it doesn’t act as a midi endpoint in and of itself - it requires an application to do that for it.
- Because of the origin of the application, it is designed to work in a very specific way; it is designed to mimic the way that the BCF2000 controller works once you have applied Steve Mokris’ Quartz Composer Sysex files. In short, this basically maps all of the buttons (barring the encoder group buttons) as midi controllers.
Usage
First launch MidiPipe and create a new pipe - with just a midi in element and a midi out element. Then launch the BCF2000 application; you can now select the MidiPipe midi input from the drop down list. For control of Garageband, for example, that’s all you have to do.
Enjoy (and if you use it let us know how we can make it better). SteamSHIFT out.
Technorati Tags:
VJ, quartz composer, midi, mac, osx, bcf2000, cocoa
November 9th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Very cool! Thanks for the opportunity to take your app for a spin. I hope this marks the genisis of another source for OS X MIDI goodies.
November 10th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
thanks for the feedback; anything in particular you’d want to see? Not that I’m promising anything - this was only really done to solve a particular need, but you never know! We’ve got a few improvements to come on this app at some point soon.
November 13th, 2006 at 9:50 am
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May 12th, 2007 at 1:06 am
hi and congrats i thinks this will be very usefull for me…
i was looking for a long time for something like this to control a project that i am making right now…
i would only have one request: could you put more faders in it say about 9 and some scenes to control something like the faders position memory like?
please help me hugs bern
May 12th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Glad you are finding it useful. Watch out for a new version coming soon!
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:34 pm
I would be interested to se your quartz compositions and also a youtube video of you using the controller
July 31st, 2007 at 1:31 pm
[…] has taken some time, but I am pleased to present an update to our Virtual BCF2000 Application (original release post). The key features of this release are the removal of the requirement to use MidiPipe, and various […]