Now it's "Moog-in-a-Box"

[Jezz Brookes]

>>4 knobs at once? 

>How about moving 16 sliders up or down at once? That's easily done with
one hand if they are laid out clsoe to each other. With a little 
>effort I can move two joysticks with each hand. That makes 8 pots moving
at once. A then I havn't even started to use my feets!

Point taken, though it doesn't leave much to play the keyboard with!

>>I think the use of MIDI
>>would offer the benefits of allowing you to record controller changes
>>easily into a sequencer without having to develop anything else.

>It IS nice to be able to record the movement of slider, knobs, switches
joysticks etc. But not at the expense of realtime control.

>IMO MIDI is no good of sending many realtime parameters. MIDI also limits
the bit resolution of any given parameter to 7 bits. That's 
>not very fun either. Might I suggest a glance at Firewire?

I believe that someone has already covered the Firewire problems (delays
and/or latency of up to 20ms). There is room in the midi spec for sending
parameters of up to 14 bits of information. It's clumsy as it uses two
continuous controller channels, paired as high and low bytes. If I recall
controllers 0-31 use 32-63 as the other half.

It's basically the age old problem of providing a degree of compatibility
as a compromise. I use a joystick yet choose to digitize it to midi and
then I'll (eventually) use a MIDI-CV for analog control. It still allows me
to have control over my digital stuff as well, sweeping delay times in
reverbs or overdrive in effects units.

jezz at enterprise.net
http://homepages.enterprise.net/jezz/