Small Touch Screen Friendly FX Hosts?

[ghettosynth]

I'm going to build a dedicated FX box and I'm looking for what might work well as a host for small screens. I don't need to be able to program it from the small screen (that's what remote control is for), just the ability to easily select programs and adjust the front panel of the FX. It would be great if the focus could, in essence, be just one effect at a time so that it largely fills the small screen.

[runagate]

I use two touchscreens, a giant one and a small one. What you're describing won't necessarily depend on the DAW so much as how the plugin reacts to touch. Mostly Windows will handle touch sufficiently well that you'll be able to poke at the controls but it'll be hard if they're tiny.

What I use instead is XotoPad as a touch MIDI controller and assign the controls' CCs to a plugin via MIDI learn. Course, that requires 2 screens. One to touch and one to see what happens on the plugin.

There's no simple solution on a small touchscreen (I've been using them for 15+ years in various iterations, long before multitouch was common to the point where I made my own multitouch remote controller MIDI GUI app on a ZiiEgg devkit of all things). Usine Hollyhock is certainly the deepest DAW for this sort of thing. I hear MuLabs is great for this sort of thing but I've never tried it.

[ghettosynth]

I use two touchscreens, a giant one and a small one. What you're describing won't necessarily depend on the DAW so much as how the plugin reacts to touch. Mostly Windows will handle touch sufficiently well that you'll be able to poke at the controls but it'll be hard if they're tiny.

This is part of the issue, to mitigate this I only want to look at one, or a few, fx at the same time. To be very clear, this box will be rack mounted with a pc and an audio interface and its entire reason for existence will be to provide time based effects that can tolerate a bit of latency. Imagine that I would want to replace something like an H90 with a PC in a rack. In an ideal world, the host would present a UI similar to Live's rack where sweeping left and right would move through the fx in the rack, and sweeping up and down would move between fx chains that are tied to specific inputs and outputs. Alternatively, it could just provide a grid of buttons with each mapped to a single effect that is routed to specific inputs and outputs. Touching the button would bring up that effect almost full screen, with some way to make it bring back the grid.

It's much less about complex routing, e.g., like what one can do in Usine or Bidule, and much more about how easy it is to define this kind of interface. For the most part, chains would be just one effect, but, it would be great to have actual chains, but I would give up any kind of parallel or complex routing to have a decent U/I.

It doesn't even have to be pre-built. I'm looking for the host that might be best to build this in. If I can't find something similar, I'm sure that I can build this in Max.

It doesn't have to work with every single plugin. In fact, I might just standardize on a set of plugins that have an identical format, such as the Eventide blackhole and friends. Or, if I wanted to be a bit more flexible, just plugins that are close enough but no larger than a particular size.