Topic: A way to control Pianoteq remotely from iPhone or iPad
I got a Raspberry Pi 4 last week and I've been investigating ways to control it remotely. I'm not sure how many people are aware of how controllable Pianoteq is purely from midi messages. You can use midi to control almost everything that you can control from Pianoteq's user interface, plus more, I think.
The solution I came up with runs on iOS and uses two different apps that are a big part of the iOS music world. The orange user interface screens with pads, knobs, and sliders (and the coding behind them that generates midi to send to Pianoteq) are done with a midi scripting app called Mozaic. All the different little Mozaic instances are hosted in an app called AUM, which also routes the midi they generate over the proper connection to get to the computer running Pianoteq.
Here's a video I made showing
what it looks like and sort of how it works: https://youtu.be/ZULA85NPMbQ
It takes a little work to set up. I think the best way would be to create custom presets for anything that you'll want to manage remotely. This would include the instrument presets, of course. But Pianoteq also lets you create separate preset files for (1) velocity curves, (2) equalizer settings, (3) reverb settings, (4) effect settings, either separately for each of the the three banks, or all together in a single file, and (5) tuning settings. There might even be one set I'm forgetting.
Individual parameters can be controlled remotely via sliders and knobs, but it's tedious to set those up. If you have a particular parameter that you want to modify remotely though, by all means you'd want to make sure to set that up.
To use this solution you'd need to do these things:
(1) have an iPhone or iPad,
(2) buy the apps Mozaic ($9) and AUM ($20)
(3) get your Pianoteq computer configured so that it can receive midi from the iOS device, this probably means (1) usb-cable between the devices, (2) rtpmidi (which is what I used), or (3) bluetooth midi (it's different than regular bluetooth, which is bluetooth audio).
(4) get a copy of the AUM session file that I'm using in the video,
(5) modify Pianoteq midimappings presets so Pianoteq will be able to respond correctly to the midi it receives remotely.
It's kind of a tedious process to get set up. If someone's interested in helping I think we could get to a solution made that would give users the ability to choose any of the built-in Pianoteq presets without having to go through the process of setting up the midimapping file in Pianoteq. Swapping built-in presets out for your own custom presets would then be relatively easy, something that could be done by someone who's not especially techy.
Anyway, it was fun to build this as a kind of "proof of concept" solution. I'd be happy to help if anyone else wants to try and use it. There's a site where I can post the AUM session file (patchstorage.com), and maybe it would also make sense to post the code up at github. (The code exists in the AUM session file and also in separate Mozaic project files, but it's saved as part of binary files, not easily accessible as text, which makes programming, especially version control, not so pleasant. But there's not much code needed, the Mozaic app takes care of most everything, an acceptable tradeoff.
