Meet Chataigne: an Artist-friendly Modular Machine for Art and Technology (Win/Mac/Lin/Pi/Arm)

Carnbot

http://benjamin.kuperberg.fr/chataigne/en

Thought I'd post about this great free, open source, donation based desktop app I've just discovered. Other artists on the forum like me, might be interested and indeed anyone who might want to automate processes on desktop, and also between desktop and iOS is possible as it can send receive midi/OSC.

Haven't used it properly yet, but I think it has quite a lot of potential in different ways.

Has a timeline that can trigger events etc.

Carnbot

Possibilities for iOS are interesting.
You could automate multiple ipads in synchronisation for example, although I guess you could do that already via Ableton, but this is a free option

senhorlampada

Couldn't even grasp the whole concept yet, but already admire the work done!
Will sure run it (or try) on my Raspberry PI

rs2000

Short excerpt from the manual:

What exactly is Chataigne ?
In most of artistic projects involving technology, creators are going to use multiple softwares and devices for different purposes : one to control audio, one to generate video, another to handle the video mapping and maybe one to control lights, or arduino boards to control motors, who knows..

In these setups, the communication and synchronization between those softwares can be challenging and therefore rapidly escalate to an overly complex setup. Also, those softwares and devices may require technical experience to be able to understand how they work and what's their best practices.

Chataigne aims to be the "conductor" of this technologic orchestra : while it will barely do anything visible to the public on it's own, it will be the one seeing the big picture and make sure that everyine gets what it needs. I'm trying hard to make the interface understandable for both technician and artists, so hopefully Chataigne would be the common workplace for artists and technician to work together.

Why and when should i use it ?
First of all, because Chataigne is a conductor and doesn't "play an instrument", you won't have much use of it unless you have an "orchestra", meaning you it will make sense if you actually have a project and want to control other softwares and devices.

Chataigne is mainly a show and interactive installation creation tool
If you have a project involving multiple softwares and / or devices, you may want to synchronize everything from a unique place dedicated to that and not have intricate relationship between all your tools.

Chataigne is working around two core concepts : the State Machine and the Time Machine.

The State Machine will handle all realtime interaction with rules that can be very basic but can get fairly complex if needed.

The Time Machine will handle all time based control, with classic timelines that can trigger controls at precise moments, or animate parameters and colors along time. It features a basic audio timeline if you need to play audio in sync, but if you need complex audio handling, you should definitely use a dedicated software for that, and control it from Chataigne.

Chataigne contains a lot of "hidden gems" and tools that integrate with the global workflow, but also can be used separately such as the Router which will basically route any input to different outputs and convert the signal at the same time. You'll discover them as you wander around the docs and the software.