Touchscreen future

[Franekk]

Hi guys, I just want to share with you my experience with new touch tablet/laptops with music production

As you probably know, Microsoft put lots of energy in new touch oriented Windows 8 system. There are some good things and bad things. Bad is main idea of two system - PRO x86/x64 and lite RT based on arm, which is total failure, and hope it will be ditched with only x86/x64. And second bad thing is forcing of new Metro style apps, that also nobody is developing. But one positive thing is thing is that Windows 8 opened whole new chapter in PC era with gave us many new hardware touch solutions, and after that (I hope) all developers will adopt their apps for better work with touch.

One more important feature of those new tablet/laptops compared to iPad, beside ability to run normal DAWs is active digitizer pen . This is extremely useful feature, it works by detecting your pen, even before you touch your screen, and hardware know which input are from your fingers, and which from pen. So you can use your one hand to scroll, or zoom with your fingers, and on the same time use your second hand with pen to precisely input data, draw envelope, or add notes.
And whats more, pens are pressure sensitive so you could control you effects in three dimension with one touch, or maybe play drum pads with different velocity.

And regarding the new hardware, I can see 4 new categories:
10" - 12" Tablets with active digitisers, good for DJing, working on ideas on the go: Surface Pro, Sony Tab 11, Samsung Ativ 7 Pro

13"-15" Foldable laptops/tablets with enough power and pen , ideal for placing them in front of you and connecting them to second monitor, with 9.1 update you could have your clips in front of you with touchscreen, and arrange on second monitor. Coming soon are Sony Vaio Flip 13-15, and new Acer R7 (Haswell), Ativ Q

19-24" Portable All-in-One with Touchscreen, Or you can call them mega tablets, unfortunately right now without active digitizer : Dell XPS 19, Sony Tab 21

20"-27" Touch screen monitors, easy to fold on the table, (and there are first units with pen support) : Acer T272HUL

And lastly my short experience running Ableton Live on Samsung Ativ 7 - its awful and useless, its impossible to control anything, there is no support for pen, where there could be tons of new control possibilities. I'm not talking about complete rewrite of Live for Metro, I'm saying that Ableton should add better support for touch control, and active digitizers (wacom and N-trig) - with all those new hardware could incredibly improve work flow.

[Franekk]

Videos of new hardware (dont know how to embed them sorry)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwTvsRgyDy4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I4iPuzSIu8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxTXeCV3ZFU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSB-gfWCg8E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAQCOypoH_c

[makeem]

+1

[Kent_in_CO]

+2

Touch-enabled Ableton + say, a Yoga II would be awesome.

[footsy]

It's fun, and new.

but nothing compares to a mouse. It's more accurate in my opinion.

my 2 cents

[yur2die4]

I don't think anyone was saying they should ditch mouse control

Just that touch can offer many many conveniences.

Multiple points at once. Which would be great for faders and tweaking. Clip launching.

More natural 'drawing'. Which can actually be easier and more graceful than a mouse.

Immediate tapping from point A to point B. for quick drawing of notes and arrangement of clips. Resizing windows.

Look at the proliferation of touch phones. They make life extremely easy.

I'm using one now infact. I haven't posted in here using a computer in years haha

[elerouxx]

Hi! I just got my hands on a Dell Latitude 10 tablet. Installed Ableton Live 9 demo on it!

In my opinion, Ableton Live runs pretty well. Of course it's not a workhorse: limited power with an Atom z2760 -still enough for simple to medium arrangements- in trade for an iPad-sized, 700g multitrack device that you can carry everywhere and which lasts about 9 hours of USE.

I always loved Ableton's design, and now it fits the tablet very well because of this one-big-window layout. Even while the icons and buttons are tiny, the touch screen seems smart enough to hit the play/stop/collapse buttons with some precision. Then, there is the digitizer stylus to make things easier. And drawing the fader envelopes with the pen or touch is sweet! I can imagine Live being improved just scaling a couple things, creating touch-friendly handles for clips and so on.

I can ZOOM all ableton by 110% and gets a little better. If I could zoom to 125 or 150% would be best, but then the window doesn't fit and the bottom of the interface gets cut even at fullscreen. I think it could be possible to be able to shrink the window even more, sacrificing the number of scenes, lines in the browser, etc. but still allowing to fit in the 1366x768 device. Still, it's a fantastic design, almost feels like thought for a tablet.

[TomViolenz]

I think the whole software would have to be rewritten for touch input, and while the pen might be more exact in the studio, I can't see anyone on stage writing on their screen...(That's even worse than the whole checking your e-mail on stage look!)

But after a rewrite for touch it might become a decent solution. I would definitely try out Live for Touch on a 27" iMacTouch with touchOSX.
It will be a few years though, I'm sure...