Thread: ReaConsole
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Old 03-08-2009, 04:14 AM   #59
Marah Mag
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Quote:
Originally Posted by illacov View Post
http://www.bella-usa.com/detail.aspx?ID=41

A gentleman coded a prog called Right Keyboard which allows you to switch keyboards when they are both connected and the program gets updated in realtime!

So once you hit blah blah on the second keyboard in theory Reaper would be alerted to the different language of the second input device and therefore recognize the key which is coming from that certain device which is assigned to the ReaConsole command.

So you can have a completely dedicated Reaper keyboard that would completely coexist with the windows layout on your first keyboard. It does add another keyboard to your desktop or studio but how dope is that? You don't lose your regular keyboard and instead you gain a much more functional keyboard that in many ways completely changes the landscape for control surfaces. You in essence can avoid midi control messages and CPU cycles by simply smacking the old keys on your keyboard!

Dammit I wish I had a second keyboard right now!
A two-keyboard system should be easy to set up, with one as your regular qwerty kb, and the other that was a dedicated control surface for Reaper, or any application, really.

Just plug in two keyboards. They can both be fully operational with no conflict, as far as i can tell.

As long as one of the keyboards is itself programmable, there'd be no need to explicitly switch between the two keyboards, or alert Reaper to the second input device. Reaper wouldn't see this setup as unusual or need to be aware of it in any way. It's all in the keyboard -- the "switching" is all virtual and is done by the keyboard's driver.

I've been using a programmable Microsoft Sidewinder X6 keyboard, and also the programmable Sidewinder mouse, for the last few weeks. I posted about them here: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=31771

Each Sidewinder has a driver that intercepts and controls its output. If one if its keys (or buttons on the mouse) has a macro assigned to it, the content of that macro is sent to whatever application has the focus. Keys that don't have macros assigned to them function normally. This keyboard would be the control surface.

The primary keyboard, which is not controlled by the Sidewinder driver, works as usual.

The two keyboards aren't aware of each other, and Reaper has no idea what's going on.

Because AHK isn't able (as far as I know) to tell the difference between the keyboard streams, it's not possible to create a bunch of AHK macros for one keyboard only.

That's why the keyboard has to have self-contained programmability.

But as long as the keyboard is programmable, there's no reason you couldn't use it as a dedicated macro server to any application you wanna control.
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