Ableton Forum

For anyone that isnt familair, the new powerbooks have a sms sensor that protects the hard rive if it senses the machine falling, tilting violently, etc. Some people have begun to design games around this, allowing you to control the action of the game by tilting your powerbook on its X or Y axis.

Is anyone on the board using this to control live or other music performance software yet. Or do you know someone who is. I dont have the time to dive into a project like this, so I was hoping someone has already detailed instruction on how to do it. I assume a program like bidule would need to be used to control actions in live like midi functions. You could you a positive tile on the X axis to control the Freq on the autofilter for example.

Let me know if you guys have any info, thanks.

peace

Just get yourself a MIDI controller; they can be had fairly cheap nowadays.

i'm sure this is just a personal taste thing, but physically moving my computer around in semi-rhythmic motions is about the last way i would ever be interested in controlling a music app.

ive got every midi controller I need. Im not desperate to find a way to control shit, lol, i was just hoping to tap into it as something kinda cool. I dont see alot of practical use for it. But it might be nice to pick up my powerbook in the middle of a set and start effecting shit out. Might stun the crowd a little.

might stun your harddrive into inaction too!!!

hmm, true, although i did try tilting it will live was playing a clip the other day and I didnt notice a problem. All my music is on an external. I also assume that if you can hack the sms to do this kind of function, you can easily disable its real purpose.

Just dont drop the laptop. Then you would really look like a jackass, lol.

inis wrote: Just dont drop the laptop. Then you would really look like a jackass, lol.

Would "too late" be a proper remark?

the kernelthread.com guy had hacked a HID driver for the sensor, using that one and some kind of max patch or other little utility could be the easiest way. can't give you a direct link since i can't connect to kernelthread myself at the moment.

ya, ill get on kernalthreads site. I fankyl was just feelin really lazy and was hoping someone would just spell out exactly how to do it for me.

dont listen to these philistines...

http://kernelthread.com/software/ams2hid/

Thanks for the link comp. It seems like the AMS Tracker would be the best way to use this technology with something like live. It is just a command line program that spits out the raw SMS data. But I have no clue how to use this info. ANyone have any ideas?

inis wrote:Thanks for the link comp. It seems like the AMS Tracker would be the best way to use this technology with something like live. It is just a command line program that spits out the raw SMS data. But I have no clue how to use this info. ANyone have any ideas?

I just glanced at this, but it seems like you need to convert HID to MIDI, Plogue Bidule can do this.

however, seems like you can get a facsimile of this with a clean, square flat pizza-style box: paint it in a mysterious fashion, put an optical mouse in it such that it slides around freely.

i would love to see someone shaking his laptop live on stage .

If you really wanna shake your laptop around to control your music (and I cannot for the LIFE of me see why...) why not make it easy on yourself and use something like a D-Beam controller or Soundbeam... That way you can actually map midi controllers to real musical parameters and modify them by moving the laptop around in relation to the beam.

Of course, you could just do the same thing with your hands.

Or your head.
Or someone else's head.
Or your butt.
Or someone else's butt.
Or a sack full of kittens.
Or a musical instrument (woah, sorry, right off the beaten track there...)

i would love to see a guy perform with only a laptop and a pizza-box - "WHOOOOO took the last pepperoooooooOOOni..... . SLIIIIIIIIIIIICe?"