Ever found the beepy metronome in your DAW annoying while producing music? Now you can turn off of the metronome and feel the beat on you trackpad. Magiclock is an OS X app that uses haptic feedback (also called Taptic Engine™) to give you the MIDI clock beat within your Magic Trackpad.
- Magiclock is a menu-bar-only app that receives MIDI Clock events and performs haptic feedback every beat/quarter note.
- For convenience, it also calculates the BPM and shows the results in the menu bar (can be switched off).
- To align the MIDI clock to quarter notes, the MIDI start and stop events are used.
- It provides a virtual MIDI Output port called "Magiclock" that can be connected to and from anywhere inside Mac OS X.
- OS X 10.11 El Capitan and later.
- Force Touch trackpad (2013 Macbook Pro, New Macbook, Magic Trackpad 2)
- MIDI clock output from DAW or hardware MIDI device
Download the zip and launch magiclock.app. Be aware, that this app is not signed, so you might need to adjust your security settings Drag the app into your Applications folder, if you like.
To use magiclock with Ableton, just activate the sync functionality for the Magiclock device from within the user preferences.
In Bitwig you have to manually add a "Generic MIDI Clock Transmitter" device and then select Magiclock from the output devices list.
You can use the MIDI Patch bay app to route MIDI clock events from any device to the magiclock virtual MIDI Output Device. Filter the input for clock events only as shown in the screen shot:
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Q: Can you support Ableton Link so that the magiclock can also align beats?
A: Link support will be added soon!
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Q: If you connect multiple devices to magiclock and set up a high BPM, my trackpad goes crazy!
A: Yes, you should not do that. Currently magiclock does not prevent the trackpad from triggering too many haptic events. While this does not cause any damage, Apples states in their API documentation:
Haptic feedback is intended to be provided in response to a user action, such as aligning one object to another. Do not use it to provide feedback for events that are not user initiated. Excessive or unnecessary haptic feedback could be interpreted by the user as a malfunction and could encourage the user to disable haptic feedback entirely.
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Q: Can you make the haptic feedback stronger? I don't feel it.
A: Unfortunately, no. Even though there are multiple levels of pressure the trackpad can sense, there is only one type of haptic feedback which is a simple tap. Maybe this will change in the future, so that it would be possible to differentiate offbeats from onbeats.
Thanks to Patrici-o for beta testings.
MIT License