I’ve got JACK set up on my laptop very effectively now, and it’s getting to be quite the multimedia all-star. Video it struggles with- after all, it’s a netbook- but audio it has no problems doing. I’m going to try and pick up a Digidesign MBox 2 at some stage to top the package off and move some DSP off-JACK. But controlling stuff on a small laptop or even a desktop can be troublesome, and there’s not a huge amount of choice when it comes to budget MIDI controllers.

One thing I’d be interested to hear about would be a simple MIDI processor/PIC/chip. My main problem with doing things like this myself is the PC interface; the Stribe1 goes for the Arduino approach, which is great but requires an Arduino and usually some tenuous birdnests to interface the Arduino to the hardware. I’d love to see a simple USB-MIDI driver board which could take some analog/digital inputs and turn it into MIDI over USB. Reliability is somewhat important in live audio, and if I could remove the slightly worrysome birdsnests from the equation I’d be a happer, saner (Relatively) person.

I’m still shocked at the complete lack of big red buttons on most electronics websites.