TapStart

The Location: A normal room. Well, perhaps not a normal room but a normal practice room filled with lots of musical instruments, keyboards, computers, amplifiers with speakers and such.

The Parties concerned: Several musicians playing different instruments but - sadly - no drummer. The computer will take its place as many times before.

The Occasion: The musicians are gathered for a small jam-session. No well-known songs to play, maybe not even a predefined song structure.

Someone just starts to play and after a while his/her tempo has settled.

Now, how do you get the tempo into the computer to have him play the drums at the right speed?

Well, you have TapStart fired up among all the synths and sequencers and you just tap the beats on its main button to get the tempo and after four beats right on the first beat of the next bar the jack transport rolls starting hydrogen (or any other sequencer/drum computer). And now the fun starts...

Features

Basicly TapStart measures a tempo you tap. But:

• It sends OSC-messages with the tempo or delay to customizable hosts and paths.
• It updates the Jack tempo on each click (=new averaged tempo).
• It can start the Jack transport after tapping a defined number of beats.

Download and Installation

TapStart uses ofqf for sending the OSC-messages. Therefor ofqf 0.1.1 or later is needed.

TapStart itself is available as a first 0.1 release. This one works but the buildsystem is rather limited but also simple:
Just run "scons" and you get a binary called "tapStart". There is no installation method yet, if you want to use TapStart in your normal path you currently have to copy it to some bin-directory yourself.

Usage

Using TapStart should be rather simple and self-explainatory (see the screenshots), but here is a very-first-steps introduction:

1. Start the app!
2. Tap your tempo on the big "Tap!"-button and see the tempo-label below change to show the current averaged tempo.
3. Play around with the jack- and OSC-parts.
4. Have fun!