PadWire

Launchpad covers, played on Linux without Ableton. PadWire = LaunchPad + PipeWire.

• Opens UniPacks, the covers of the UniPad community, zipped or as a folder, and Ableton covers: the .als set, whose samples are found again wherever the cover was unpacked.
• Plays their sounds with little latency, through PipeWire.
• Lights a real Launchpad (the Mini MK3 for now) as the cover says, and shows the same lights on screen, where the pads can be played with the mouse. The lights of Ableton covers come from their racks of MIDI effects (Pitch, Chord, Velocity, Note Length, Arpeggiator), which PadWire plays as Live would.
• Plays a cover through by itself, or practises it with you: the pads to press next light up, and it waits for them. The performance comes from a UniPack's autoPlay, or from an Ableton cover's tutorial clip or clip of the whole song.

Building

PadWire needs Rust, GTK 4.18 or later, libadwaita 1.7 or later, and the development files of ALSA and PipeWire.

cargo run --release

A cover can be given on the command line, padwire cover.zip, opened from the window, or dropped on it.

Without a Launchpad

examples/fake_launchpad.rs makes virtual MIDI ports by the names of a Mini MK3's. PadWire connects to it as to the real one, and it prints what PadWire lights:

cargo run --example fake_launchpad

tests/fake_device.rs does the same in the tests, wherever there is an ALSA sequencer.

examples/inspect_cover.rs prints what PadWire reads of a cover, page by page, without playing it, and with --lights PAGE X Y what a press of a pad lights, in time:

cargo run --release --example inspect_cover -- --lights 1 4 3 path/to/cover.als

PADWIRE_APP_ID=dev._2c2t.padwire.Test runs a second PadWire beside the one already running, rather than handing it the cover.

How it is made

Module	What it does
model	A cover, whatever its format: pages of pads, their sounds and lights
formats	Covers read into the model: unipack, and als for Ableton Live Sets
engine::audio	The mixer, on the audio thread, told what to play through a lock-free ring buffer, and played through cpal
engine::decode	Every sound decoded into memory at the output's rate before the cover plays
engine::led	The lights' programs, played on a clock of their own thread
engine::midifx	Ableton's MIDI effects, played in that thread for the lights of .als covers
engine::session	What a press does, from the Launchpad or the window
device	The Launchpad found, connected and given back; one profile per model, and the note layouts
ui	The window, in GTK 4 and libadwaita

Settings and the library are kept in ~/.config/padwire/config.toml.

Roadmap

Version	What
0.1	UniPacks, the Mini MK3, the grid on screen
0.2	Ableton .als covers: sounds, pages, mappings, sample paths found again
0.3	Ableton's MIDI effects emulated, for the lights of .als covers
0.4	autoPlay and practice mode (done); other Launchpads, Flatpak

Credits

The Launchpad palette comes from Apollo Studio, © 2019 mat1jaczyyy, under the BSD 3-Clause licence.