10 comments

  • donatj2 天前
    The amount of neat things my synth friends do, including controlling lighting, with control voltage has me dreaming of a world where knobs and levers and UIs generally were way more customizable than we have now.
  • moepstar2 天前
    > We needed to move a PTZ cam based on the stage/pulpit mute states on our X32, but it is capable for way more.

    PTZ - pan/tilt/zoom camera, that much I understood. The rest? Uh… can I get an ELI5 please?

    Even though I’m clearly not in the target demographic, I’m eager to learn more..

    Edit: ok, clicked through to GitHub, now I (kinda) got what it’s for :)

    • smitelli2 天前
      The X32 is a series of audio mixing consoles[1] to combine the signals from multiple microphones and/or musical instruments to a venue's speakers or to a recording/streaming apparatus.

      In this case, there are multiple points of interest on the stage which are sometimes used, and sometimes not. When an area of the stage is unused, the microphone(s) at that location are manually muted to eliminate unwanted noise. The remaining unmuted microphone is at a location of interest, which is also the logical thing for a motorized camera to point toward and zoom onto at that moment.

      This project uses the muted/unmuted states of microphones as a cue for camera movement, although it takes some upfront work to set it up. It also could cause trouble for looser or more improvisational shows where such rigidity might actually get in the way.

      [1]: https://www.behringer.com/series.html?category=R-BEHRINGER-X...

      • brudgers2 天前
        Just to clarify, the x32 mixers are digital mixers (not analog). So they have non-trivial computing power (for some definitions of “non-trivial”), reasonable amounts of onboard storage/memory, and network connectivity.

        This allows them to be programmed as general purpose computers.

      • mrandish2 天前
        Thanks for explaining! Just posting to add a link to OSC (Open Sound Control) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control
      • kcsaba219 小时前
        Excellent and precise explanation, thank you:)
    • kxrm2 天前
      That's kind of the challenge of using jargon and industry specific acronyms. Creators should use plain language to describe their product as much as they can, even if your intended audience should be aware, it is a good way to practice improving your communication skills.
  • atmanactive2 天前
    I'm curious, did you ever come across Chataigne?

    https://github.com/benkuper/Chataigne

    • kcsaba219 小时前
      If I'd have, I might have not developed this:)) It's very hard to define what this thing is, and it's even harder to search for it. (In both my and this case). Also that name is very weird for me as a non-french:)

      I have started to mess around with Chataigne, it seems promising, but this far I'm getting stuck at trivial steps (matching a regexp, converting a "contains" to bool, etc). We'll see how I progress with support:)

      But that guy is clearly brilliant just like Chataigne.

      Thanks for mentioning!

    • emmanueloga_1 天前
      This looks similar to https://ossia.io/

      Interestingly, both seem to be projects from French developers, and they look very similar.

  • kasperkamperman2 天前
    I did an explainer on OSC to explain the concepts. Indeed I think its the easiest network protocol to just hook different things together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uOR2idKvrM
    • kcsaba219 小时前
      Good job, thanks for sharing!
  • nzoschke2 天前
    Starred!

    I’ve been playing with hooking up a MIDI controller to my OBSBot Tail Air PTZ camera and OBS.

    The config and filters and triggers looks similar to my prototypes.

    I’ve been wondering if there’s any sort of prior art or standards here from other domains like lighting consoles or workflow systems.

    • kcsaba219 小时前
      Thank you so much.

      If I understand your prior-art question, I think there is a few: - the OSC protocol for audio gear and some other studio equipment. - In the lighting world I heard DMX is king - OBS has a very extensive Websocket client

      For PTZ cameras I'm not sure, our old PTZ camera needs HTTP GET-s to weird urls (RPC).

      Thanks again for starring!

  • pbhjpbhj2 天前
    Could you have some sort of tee, so instead of dedicating a channel you multiplexed a second extra-audible signal (outside the audible range) onto the same channel? Or perhaps send a really low frequency signal over the cable sheath??

    Just spitballing.

    • kcsaba219 小时前
      For my tool i don't really think that's possible as of now, through OSC you don't get the audio signal (afaik), maximum the level at some precision.

      Also general audio stuff is from 20-20khz, so you don't really have headroom to super(or sub?) impose another signal into it frequency wise, as it would be audible. (Unless you sacrifice some parts with a high/low cut on the original signal.)

      Although you could have 48khz sampling rate on most audio gear, so you could do time-multiplexing if you are really desperate, but then all signals need processing before becoming useful/noiseless.

      About the cable sheath, of course you can do anything with custom circuits, but general audio stuff will not help you in that as far as i know.

      If you ask it because of controlling the cam with a mute status felt out-of-place for you, then: no it's not wasting any channels. As someone above already explained very precisely above, the thing is you don't want to have live and unused microphones on your setup, due to feedback, extra noise, etc.

      So if the speaker is speaking, the band is muted, if the band is playing the speaker is muted. And this can be used (in our case, not always for everyone), to track where the event is happening, and the camera can turn at the right position based on this. Therefore we, in our usecase could eliminate an extra step for someone to manage the camera by hand.

      By the way, many consoles have extra buttons/knobs that are assignable to random stuff, so through OSC i could query their states as well and i could set up camera movement with those as well if i wanted to.

  • benji-york2 天前
    Very nice! The ability to get novel interactions out of connected devices is something I think we're just starting to bloom.
  • srameshc2 天前
    Unrelated, I have an old Axiom midi controller that I'd like to reprogram to use with GarageBand. I'm not sure where to start, but I'm thinking of using Go or Rust. Do you have any pointers on how to get started?
    • aspenmayer2 天前
      You can’t use it as native MIDI in GarageBand?
  • blahlabs2 天前
    Is there a reason to use this over Bitfocus Companion?
    • kcsaba219 小时前
      Hi! Yes, as far as I see it is a control board, that needs someone to operate it. And thats the reason, my tool automates the camera movement.

      By the way, we do have a custom keyboard as well, which is basically a separation of concerns/simplified interface for OBS, which is intimidating for most of our crew. But they can handle 10 buttons with nice labels.

      For example they have one button that toggles the camera view and the projector view.

      Also I scripted OBS to manage camera positions with the scene "Pulpit", "Stage", "Pulpit wide", "Sitting": so they can manually override the automated thing in 1% of the time, but 99% of the time the automation is enough.

      Also I have scripted OBS to manage the stream lifecycle based on which scene is active. So: - they can bring up the "Starting soon" scene that would start streaming but not the recording - they can bring up the "Break" scene that would pause(!) the recording but not the stream - they can bring up the "Finished" scene that would stop all with a nice fade out and "thank you for joining" text, etc.

      So a control pad can work together with this tool.

  • ssfrr2 天前
    OSC (Open Sound Control) is just awesome. It's basically a lightweight protocol on top of UDP packets. It's not hard to roll your own implementation if there isn't one for your platform. It's lacking a lot of features you'd need for a scalable system, but when you just need a few systems to send realtime messages to each other, it's tough to beat.

    I've used it a lot for the original designed use-case (sending parameter updates between controllers and music synths), but also a bunch of other things (sending tracking information from a python computer vision script to a Unity scene).

    • 2 天前
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