I just acquired an used HP Slate 21 Pro for the sole purpose of running touchable pro on it. This hybrid 21" FullHD Android tablet / Windows touchscreen can be purchased for a low price second hand (I bought mine for 80€) and although it has only two finger touch and is camera based it still seems very usable. There´s a lot of screen… I figured this setup might interest some others searching for a big touchscreen setup for Live, so I’ll update my findings here. Please comment freely and share your experiences especially if you have a similar setup.
Edit: I purchased both the Android and Windows apps, I’ll be commenting both of them.
First some initial impressions of the Slate 21 Pro:
+Lots of screen… It’s really a joy to use compared to my other android / iPad devices
+Although the touch interface is camera based, it works quite ok. I wouldn’t use it for a live performance, as there are some missed touches, but overall for home studio use it feels ok
+Internal power supply and lots of connection options
+Wired 10/100 network interface!
+Can be used as a regular Windows touch screen as well and swithced on the fly (there’s a button in the front).
-price! I couldn’t find a fullHD touch screen this cheap
-Just two fingers touch
-Android version 4.4.2 and I wouldn’t hold my breath for updates. All apps won’t even run on this anymore.
-I haven’t found a way to use the upstream USB port for PC-Android device connection. It might be used only for the PC-touchscreen function. The manual does not help. Well at least the device has wired network connection for communicating with the server.
Then some notes on using Touchable pro on this device with Windows 10 64bit / Live Suite 10 64bit. Overall it feels great and seems like a fantastic way to control Live, but I’ll list here just the problems and questions I find.
Edit: After using the app for real editing / mixing duties I found out I can’t really use it because of it’s shortcomings / bugs. I really hope it will be improved, it would be a great help if it performed well.
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After installing rtpmidi and the server and succesfully using touchable the server still moans every time when started: “Unable to connect via USB. Could not locate Apple Application Support DLL. Please install iTunes to connect iOS devices via USB”. I don’t want to install iTunes or use iOS devices with USB. Why does this message pop up every time the server is started, I got it the first time…
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For some reason the server does not autostart even if I place a shortcut to my profile startup folder, I’ll have to look at this. Anyway it would be much more convenient to have an autostart option in the server application frontend.
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It seems that the app (both android + win) is incomplete and somewhat buggy at this point, I would have really wanted to use it for creating custom interfaces. It’s nice to be able to use it but it really feels now more beta than finished app. Hopefully it will be completed and creating custom interfaces and recalling the last state of the app properly will work out at some point.
Android app notes:
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Using MultiCntrl crashes the android app even when the server is not running and there is no connection
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The android app loses connection randomly sometimes when doing nothing. The server still sees the app at that time so it’s possibly a bug with the android app?
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I couldn’t save or load any templates for custom designs. save / export just doesn’t do anything and new files are not created.
Windows app notes:
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The MultiCntrl works with windows app and so far it seems to keep the connection without losing it
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However when you setup a MultiCtrl panel for adjusting all the returns for example, and apply “Restore Layout” option, the MultiCtrl layout is not restored correctly next time you open the app. So you have to setup everything again every time when opening the app…
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I haven’t been able to save, export or use any of the file operations with custom templates. This would be the most useful part of the app, but it does not seem to work at all.
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Using Touchable Pro makes my Live 10 suite to crawl when changing the order of tracks, deleting tracs etc. I can take a sip of coffee every time I delete a track while I’m waiting for Live to communicate with Touchable. The Touchable logo appears on the app window while the changes happen. I just had to close the app and server while editing a session, this behavior slows me down too much to be of any use. Too bad.