RE: EDP Hardware Interface

["Dennis W. Leas" <dennis@mail.worldserver.com>]

(Philosophizing section starts...)

To me, it's not surprising that a MIDI controller unleashes much of the
latent potential in an EDP.  That's somewhat a measure of a mature product.

In gross terms: digital musical equipment begins to all have the same block
diagram.  ADC->computer->DAC with some kind of interface hanging off to the
side.  MIDI, though outdated, still functions well as a control interface.
We see USB and Firewire emerging to handle the higher bandwidth requirement
of the audio interface.

Still, most musicians want some kind of basic hardware controls on the box.
The hardware interface layout is determined by the device's initial feature
set.  Since the magic is in the software, updates to the feature set 
rapidly
obsolete the hardware interface.

The EDP is incredible in that the same hardware interface (designed how 
many
years ago?) works quite well today.  (Fabulous engineering, Matthias!)  But
the expansion of the MIDI interface, especially in LoopIV, shows how mature
the EDP is.

(Practical section starts...)

So does anybody have a velocity sensitive footpedal?  With that and a 
little
KeyKit or Max programming you could map MIDI switches to multiple EDP
functions.  For example, light taps give you conventional Record, Overdub,
quantizedRoundedMultiply, Insert, etc. and hard presses give you SUSRecord,
SUSOverdub, unquantizedUnroundedMultiply, SUSInsert, etc.