The lowdown on Katapult

To recap for people who haven’t been following this from the beginning, Katapult is a mapping application similar to Novations Automap, only much more flexible and feature-packed. With Katapult, you can map up to 16 individual pages of buttons, faders, sliders and indicators (plus more in development) to the Launchpad surface. It’s all in full color glory, and even supports your MIDI software talking back to the Launchpad to update the controls on the Launchpad surface.

So, over the last weeks, a lot have happened with Katapult. Initially, I was thinking it as an open source project, seeking more developers to help completing and testing it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anyone interested in joining the project. Instead I set out to complete it myself. This has involved a lot of work, but I am very happy to finally be able to say that Katapult is ready for it’s first public beta release. Gone are all of the intricacies with running MIDI through PureData and altering the source code to actually get it running. Katapult is now totally self-contained. It will automatically detect and connect to the Launchpad, and there is now a graphical user interface for selecting what software MIDI ports or devices to connect to. It can be used with Traktor, Logic, GarageBand or even physical synthesizers or devices. Basically, if it speaks MIDI, Katapult loves it. Initially, Mac and Windows builds will be released. The Linux version is untested because I don’t have a Linux driver for the Launchpad yet. When I get the chance to test the Linux build, I will release that as well.

I am currently waiting for the domain name for the website I created for Katapult to become active, which should hopefully happen within a couple of days. As soon as it’s active, Katapult will be available for immediate download for everyone

www.midikatapult.com

Katapult update

Update: All the source, plus an absolutely-alpha-beta-alpha build will be put up on Google Code very soon, but please be patient, since I have a lot of work right now. I’m trying to squeeze in work on this wherever i can, so I can get it out there

So, here is a few more details on Katapult. I’ve been adding a lot of stuff today, and getting close to something that is release-worthy. The current features include:

Fully customizable layouts can be mapped to the entire grid of the Launchpad

Multipart layouts are supported and can be toggled using buttons on the Launchpad

The layouts are loaded into Katapult from a simple easy-to-write text-file (line example: yfader 0 7 8). This is kinda like mrmr-style layout files.

LED-colors of the controls can be set to any of the supported colors of the Launchpad

Katapult supports bi-directional control-messages. This means that changing a fader in for example Traktor, will also update the corresponding fader on the Launchpad surface. Me thinks this is cool.

Controls currently implemented are:

• Hold button
• Toggle button
• Horizontal fader
• Vertical fader
• Horizontal slider-zone
• Vertical slider-zone

Okay, might have forgotten something, but it does give a good overview of the current state of the thing. I’m going to implement support for 2D-pad controls, as well as an “indicator” control, that doesn’t send output, but can be used as an indicator light, before releasing it. I think that will make it out for a pretty suitable start. And after that? More advanced visualizers (beat-grid style, etc), timed functions, triggered after x beats, controller-chaining (altering one control can influence others), macros(!). A visual layout-editor would be nice but definitely won’t be first priority, since the layouts really are very easy to write by hand. Here’s a new video. It doesn’t show any of the bi-directional stuff, but it does make it clear how multi-page layouts are handled.

The more technical stuff: It’s all written in Processing. I’m writing and using it on OS X 10.6, but should work fine on other platforms as well. I found Processings MIDI support a bit annoying to work with (for output), so I took the easy route and offloaded the MIDI output handling to PureData through OSC. When I get the motivation, I’ll probably move the MIDI output back into the actual program, but I couldn’t find any MIDI-framework that did what I wanted to do, so PD is a fine solution right now. The patch is very simple and looks like this:

So, that’ll be it for now Hopefully a release soon!

Katapult, I say

Yes, I say Katapult. What is it you say?

Well, I recently, after much struggle, got my hands on Novations Launchpad controller, hooray. It’s pretty cool, and very functional for controlling Ableton Live. Unfortunately my plan was never to use it with live, but instead with Traktor. In this regard, it is utterly lacking and uncool. Mostly because Novations Automap software is absolutely featureless in terms of what i wanted to do.

So when the software to make your dreams come true doesn’t exist, you just have to write it yourself. Hence I started writing Katapult. It’s intended to be a dynamic, totally customizable mapping solution for the Launchpad, that allows for much more functionality than the pretty mediocre hold-button scheme of Automap. So what does it do?

It allows you to create various controls on the surface of the Launchpad such as faders, buttons and “slider zones”. The MIDI output of these indivdual controls can then be mapped to different fuctions in Traktor, for example.

I have a lot of interesting ideas planned for this thing, but basics first. When I feel I’ve gotten all the basics down and tidied up the code a bit, I’ll release a preview and move on to some of the more interesting stuff

Okay, it’s late and I’m brainsmashed, so this might not be a very informative and detailed post. Intsead, I give you ZE VIDEO!

Here’s a rather uninspired and boring “mix” using the thing. It definitely won’t give you eargasms, but it’ll give you a general idea of how it works. Promise to post the technical nitty-gritty later