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The Lemur

No, not those animals with the big eyes; the Lemur is a new touch-control surface for computer-based synthesists. (Why do
lemurs so fascinate musicians?)

Not cheap: $2495. But it provides something exceptionally cool: you can drag-and-drop your desired controls in a Mac Windows, or Linux application and up load them to the Lemur. The controls are all described via XML, so the more programming-minded could conceiveably generate the controls under software control. You can even define multiple pages of different controls, so
you can swap back and forth between multiple controllers from the same device.

The Lemur communicates via OSC (Open Sound Control) over Ethernet, so anything that understands OSC can be controlled by the Lemur: PD, Max/MSP, Native Instrument’s Reaktor, SuperCollider, ChucK … as mentioned on the website, you could control a batch of different instruments, even remotely, since you’re working over Ethernet.

You’re not limited to just sliders and buttons and knobs; you’ve got two-dimensional areas as well. The Lemur doesn’t have pressure sensitivity - for that you need a Thunder
- but it promises to be a really cool option for folks who wanted to have less standard controls for their software synthesis.

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