Symbian ports

I want to start this post with my biggest kudos to Nokia. I've been accepted in the Qt Ambassadors Program and VMPK is now in the Ambassador Showcase among other great Qt applications.

Not only that, they have sent me a great Nokia C7-00 smartphone as a gift. This device uses Symbian^3 and can be programmed using Qt. It has a touchscreen with two concurrent touch points. Just what I wanted for VMPK! So there is hope that the next VMPK release will enjoy multitouch support, thanks to Qt and Nokia.

There will be also a Symbian port of VMPK, but some tests using the device's MIDI synthesizer and a few other tests show that the audio latency is so big that it is unbearable for real time usage. Another direction to explore is the wireless network, to send MIDI data using for instance a protocol based on UDP multicast like QMidiCtl, a program by our fellow Qt Ambassador Rui Nuno Capela.

QMidiCtl was created for Maemo, and it is available for Nokia N900 devices. It can be compiled also in Linux and Windows, but required a few adaptations for Symbian. Anyway, it works well in my C7 and here is a proof

I've tested it sending MIDI events to Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. The complementary software for Linux is QMidiNet, also made by Rui. It is compatible with IpMIDI by nerds.de that is available for Windows and Mac OSX. This may open interesting possibilities for VMPK not only on smartphones, but also on netbooks and tablets...