Announced earlier this year, Cycling ’74 has now released Mira, its iPad controller for both Max and Max for Live.
There’s no need to set up any network communication as Mira takes care of it for you. Once you drop a mira.frame object into your patch supported UI objects in that region will show up in Mira. You can control multiple Max or Max for Live patches with one iPad, control one patch with several iPads or anything in between.
Mira is only available for iPad, no other iTouch devices and it requires Max 6.1.3, and Live 9 for Max for Live usage. At USD 49.99 it’s not exactly cheap and it only makes sense to get if you primarily want to control Max or Max for Live devices. If you need to control Ableton Live as well, Lemur costs the same and offers interactive scripting and a physics engine. That said, if it’s all about Max or Max for Live for you, Mira requires hardly any setup and gives you an almost immediate hands-on control.
Have a look:
Features:
- Automatically control any number of patches from your device
- New mira.frame objects create viewable regions in your patch
- Use multiple mira.frames to create any number of tabbed views in Mira
- Most UI objects in a mira.frame will appear in Mira
- New mira.multitouch object allows for gestural control
- New mira.motion object sends accelerometer data from your device
- Zoom and pan to tweak views on your device
- Multiple instances of Mira can control a single patch for collaborative performance
- Works over WiFi or an ad-hoc network
Supported Objects:
- button, live.button
- toggle, live.toggle
- dial, live.dial
- slider, live.slider, rslider, multislider, kslider
- live.tab, live.text
- comment
- panel
- fpic
- message box
- number, flonum, live.numbox
- gain~, meter~
- mira.multitouch, mira.motion
Mira is available now on the App Store for iPad only, requiring iOS 5.0 or later.
3 responses
For as much as I tried to integrate the iPad in my workflow, I can’t really make it. As a software synth it surely makes more sense, but I guess I’ll need to hook it to a camera connector because working with wi-fi MIDI is far too laggy for my taste. But a controller, meh, I prefer the Push, I still like some physical feedback.
I agree on the physical feedback, but with all the controls I need for my live performance my controller would have to be gigantic. I’ve also got no problem with lag on the iPad at all.
Ok I suppose about the lag problem it is mainly due to the fact I don’t use ad-hoc wi-fi but just connect to my home wi-fi :p I can see its usefulness in a live environment, but in the studio, honestly, not as much.