Particle trigger via midi

I'm not sure if you really have to involve a stop watch in any way...

I would be thinking along the lines of connecting the midi note to a math patch, and maybe the particle count, perhaps with a smooth. Everytime you hit the midi note, the particles count will go from 0 to whatever you set up, and look like a particle bloom.

You could also connect an RGB patch to the color input and use MIDI to control the alpha, so that you don't see particles if a midi note isn't played. You could also use some math to make the velocities increase, when you have a midi note.

If you wanted to employ a stop watch, you would select the particle system, cntrl+click on it, set time base to external, and connect the output of the patch to the timebase of the particle system. However, you will likely want it to reset everytime the midi note isn't being played, so you'll need to do something like make a math patch "!a", connect your midi out to it, and then the output to reset, so that whenever a midi note isn't playing, your counter will reset.

You may be able to get the effect you want by doing something as simple as hooking your midi note out to the enable of the particle patch.

no need for a stopwatch. see comp / replace keyboard boolean input with midi input.

Thanks!

I have something working with the quartz particle system. its quite limited though, would be good to do this with the kineme explosion particle patch.

say i want different midi notes to trigger different colour particles, do i have to set up a different particle system for each note?

try midi 2 color plugin. see attached. it is a "how to get started making plugins" example form apples custom patch programing guide.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Co...

i don't know where the source is anymore but it was copied right from the guide. so if this plug doesn't run on your system i suggest following the guide and building it for your system.

the plugin takes a midi note number as input and outputs a color based on the note. just hook your midi notes into the plugin and attach the output color to the particles color.

you can also make a multiplexor with a bunch of colors attached to it. get info on the plexor go to settings and change from virtual to color. set up a few inputs and change the colors for each input. then either with conditionals and logic or JS say...

if (c3==true) return result.index = 0 else if (c4==true)return result.index = 1

then plug the index into the multiplexors source index. when you play c3 it will change color to what ever is on multiplexors index 0 etc....

or use the plugin...