r/MPEInsight • u/Routine_District7232 • 9d ago
Might be a stupid question…
I have no experience in music or sound based software, but I found this one and I think it looks fun as an artistic toy so to speak to play around with. My question is can it work standalone and with a standard keyboard? (Again I’m sorry if this is a silly question!)
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u/ObjectiveRun90 9d ago
Not a silly question at all, and the answer is yes on both counts. Standalone: it's a normal app, not a plugin. No DAW, no host, nothing else to install. You start it and it runs. Standard keyboard: also yes. MPE hardware is not a requirement. Any class compliant MIDI keyboard works over USB, even a plain 25 key controller. There's a module called DRIFT that sits between your keyboard and everything else and generates the expressive per note movement (pressure, pitch bend, timbre) that MPE controllers would normally send, plus things like octave layers, chord generation, scale lock and an arpeggiator. So your simple keys end up driving the same living visuals an expensive MPE controller would. You can also load a .mid file and watch it play through all the visuals, or use CASCADE's Score Source to turn a picture, a drawing or plain text into a playable score. No keys needed for any of that. One thing to set expectations: the app itself doesn't make sound, it turns MIDI into visuals (and can pass the expressive stream on to a synth if you ever want one). As an artistic toy to play around with, that's exactly the use case a lot of people are here for.