Bitwig Lemur Template Setup and Demo

03 Jan 2016

The video below explains how to set up the Bitwig template for Lemur, which allows you to wirelessly control Bitwig Studio from your iPad using OSC.

To briefly summarize the video, Lemur is a mobile app, created by Liine, that lets you design your own MIDI and OSC controller interfaces.  Users can share templates through Liine's user library.  (Antonio Blancas, a developer for Twisted Tools, has done some incredible interface design and programming for Lemur templates.)

You can read about the Bitwig template at the Liine user library here or you can go directly to the GitHub page for the template here.  After you download the template you can copy it from your laptop to your iPad using iTunes file sharing.

In addition to the Bitwig template, you'll need to grab the Lemur4Bitwig controller script for Bitwig Studio, which enables Bitwig to respond to OSC messages sent from Lemur.  (It's awesome that Bitwig's open controller scripting API lets you send and receive messages from network services!)  And for questions about the template there's a dedicated support forum at KVR.

Note that there are a few rough edges with the script and template, for example, clip launcher automation and record settings don't work, there's no support for group tracks, there's no documentation so you have to learn the template by using it (which isn't so bad since much of the functionality is straightforward), etc.  But by and large it's a solid control surface that showcases the power and flexibility of Lemur nicely.  Hopefully we'll see more work on the template and script this year.  It'd be great to see them improve and evolve alongside Bitwig's feature set.