Free Software Turns Your iPhone Into A Music Controller

Niklas Saers has released a free iPhone music app, pOSCa (App Store link), that turns your iPhone into a controller for audio and multimedia software.

If you’ve used pOSCa, leave a comment below and let us know what you think of it!

Description:

pOSCa is an Open Sound Control compliant controller for audio and multimedia software such as Ableton Live, Reaktor, Plogue Bidule, Traktor, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data and OSCulator.

Using the controller from the iPhone allows the electronics music performer to get up from behind the laptop and interact with his audience. pOSCa sports a nice dial, up/down and left/right buttons and ten programmable buttons. Programming the buttons is easy: just select a button and set a value with the dial, then you can set another button to another value. When you hit the first button again, the dial will spin in place and give the desired value. This allows for easy pre-programming up to the performance and quick interactivity.

In order to have no surprises in concert, the settings are kept in the iPhone/iPod’s Settings area. Be sure to set the settings to interact with your audio software.

Here you can set your computers IP address and what UDP port your software is listening to. You can also set a name for the device so that you can have multiple devices controlling the same synth without causing confusion. Also you can set default min and max values. These are by default set to max and min for MIDI as many of the synth come from a MIDI heritage, but they can be set to anything you want.

pOSCa works best using WiFi and works equally well on the iPhone and iPod touch, although when using it in concert you might want to turn off the phone functionality first.

2 thoughts on “Free Software Turns Your iPhone Into A Music Controller

  1. Hiya. I am unsure as to how to set this up for Arkaos Grand VJ using a Mac. I've used some MIDI controllers on the iPhone 3G before, and for this I set up a special network, ran a MIDI server (DSMIDIWiFi) and used that as my device in Grand VJ. For OSC, I only have the option to change ports in Grand VJ (no IP, no server). I have synced the ports, set up the network and… nothing. Am I missing something?

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