Geco MIDI Leap Motion Gestural Controller Now Free

Developer Geert Bevin has announced that Geco MIDI, his gestural MIDI controller app for the Leap Motion, is now available as a free download.

GECO doesn’t produce or manipulate sound directly, its purpose is to control other software or hardware that understands MIDI, OSC or CopperLan.

Features:

  • 40 different control streams with both hands
  • Any control stream can be mapped to MIDI CC, Channel Pressure, Pitchbend and Pitchwheel messages on 16 different channels
  • High-resolution 14-bit MIDI support with customizable fine message number
  • High-resolution OSC support with customizable paths and OSC server selection
  • Full support for CopperLan data output, assignment, learning and mapping storage
  • Tunable gesture boundaries with support for defining dead zones around the center positions
  • Instantly switch between related control streams by opening or closing your hands
  • Carefully designed GUI for an immediate overview of the active MIDI mappings
  • Real-time low-latency visual feedback of your hand movements and MIDI data
  • Integrated virtual MIDI port on MacOSX, additional freely available software can be used to send MIDI to other applications on Windows
  • Connects to any known MIDI output port on your computer, for instance hardware synthesizers, on both MacOSX and Windows
  • Fully customizable user interface (colours, graphical elements, background image)
  • Flexible document management that can be loaded while performing gestures
  • High performance and near-zero latency engine with virtually no CPU impact when the real-time visualizations are hidden
  • MIDI decimation setting to allow integration with legacy hardware that has limited MIDI bandwidth
  • Advanced data output tuning with range inversion, minimum and maximum boundaries, distribution curves, attack and decay times

For an example of what’s possible with the Geco, check out this demonstration of gestural orchestration by Hagai Davidoff:

If you’ve used Geco, leave a comment and share your thoughts on it!

7 thoughts on “Geco MIDI Leap Motion Gestural Controller Now Free”

  1. That’s very cool that it is now free.

    I was an early purchaser of the LEAP MOTION. It seemed to tax my RMBP (2.6 GHz i7) pretty intensely. I didn’t end up getting into it as a controller. Seemed promising, but I didn’t expect it to be such a resource-hog. Perhaps that was a fluke.

    1. “Perhaps that was a fluke.”

      It’s a stereo infrared camera that feeds two video streams over USB. All of the DSP real time video processing is then done inside the driver running on your computer. So that’s why it tends to bog down, if you don’t have the latest machine with multiple processors. Still great, but at the price point it couldn’t have a high performance DSP engine on the device itself.

  3. I bought Geco when it came out. Need to use it more. It works really well – I was inspired to get the Leap motion when I watched a video of a guy using it as a virtual violin. If you use it sitting down though your arms really start to ache after a while.

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