Wednesday September 13, 2006
AlphaTrack

Our latest product, AlphaTrack. It's a USB powered, compact control surface for working with computer digital audio workstations. Touch sensitive, motorized fader makes it easy to see and adjust levels on tracks (doing so with a mouse is far from intuitive or good for your carpals!). The three knobs below the screen are also touch sensitive and used for adjusting things like Pan, Send levels, changing tracks, EQ, plugin parameters, and others depending on the program being used. The great thing about being touch sensitive is as soon as you touch the knob the display changes to show details about the parameter (and even automation read/write status for the parameter on LEDs) and its value.

Lots of buttons for controlling things like looping, punch, and even flip (transpose knob parameters to the fader for finer control) and of course the standard five transport controls: Rewind, Fast Forward, Stop, Play, and Record. Big, illuminated buttons for Record arming, Mute, and Solo are over by the fader. Also lots of LEDs for status and a big, backlit LCD with two lines of text. A brand new and very clever (ok, I may be biased) control is the touch strip right above our logo. Use one finger on it to move the scrub through your project's timeline, and two fingers to jump in and out of shuttle mode. Sweet!


AlphaTrack
zandra • 2006-09-13 07:49am

Spiffy! Does it come in green?
jerry • 2006-09-13 09:00am

Any color you want as long as it's blue and black!
Ted • 2006-09-13 01:42pm

I feel a strong NEED for this item coming on! ;-) I'll bite: what's it cost?
jerry • 2006-09-13 07:34pm

$249 MSRP which I think typically translates into $199 street
CasioNova • 2006-09-13 10:11pm

Very nice. Whats the programmability for using with other software, eg. Ardour ?
jerry • 2006-09-14 07:39am

Hi CasioNova,

The Ardour guys should be able to add support for it just like they did with TranzPort:
http://www.ardour.org/manual/control_surfaces/tranzport

Det3 • 2006-09-15 03:09am

Quite a cool function with the touch-sense knobs. Was that a custom thing you did, or a standard encoder off the shelf? I've got a similar articulation method I'm working on for an audio synthesizer using encoders with an integrated switch, it's very handy and saves on the cost of LED rings. :-)
krister • 2006-10-07 11:42am

is there a channel select or bank select and how is this done on here?
jerry • 2006-10-07 11:48am

Hi Krister,

The touch encoder on the left is used for changing tracks and also, depending on app, for changing between tracks and bus.

The sweet thing is that since all three encoders are touch sensitive the display can instantly change to show more information about the parameter or function they are mapped to. For example, if you touch an encoder mapped to Pan the display changes to show a bar graph of the current pan value, along with a numeric value. And pushing the encoder while adjusting changes into fine adjust mode.

jerry • 2006-10-07 11:50am

Hi Det3,

Yes, custom by us using an off the shelf encoder with some special Frontier Design Group magic. ":^)