pOSCa is an Open Sound Control compliant controller for audio and multimedia software such as Ableton Live, Reaktor, Plogue Bidule, Traktor, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data, OSCulator and many, many more. Using the controller from the iPhone allows the electronics music performer to get up from behind the laptop and interact with his audience.
pOSCa sports a nice dial, up/down and left/right buttons and ten programmable buttons. Programming the buttons is easy: just select a button and set a value with the dial, then you can set another button to another value. When you hit the first button again, the dial will spin in place and give the desired value. This allows for easy pre-programming up to the performance and quick interactivity
In order to have no surprises in concert, the settings are kept in the iPhone/iPod’s Settings area. Be sure to set the settings to interact with your audio software. Here you can set your computers IP address and what UDP port your software is listening to. You can also set a name for the device so that you can have multiple devices controlling the same synth without causing confusion. Also you can set default min and max values. These are by default set to max and min for MIDI as many of the synth come from a MIDI heritage, but they can be set to anything you want
pOSCa works best using WiFi and works equally well on the iPhone and iPod touch, although when using it in concert you might want to turn off the phone functionality first 🙂