11/14/2022 0 Comments Mixxx review![]() The trackpad is very sensitive to small movements, like even a slight roll of the finger. God bless the fine folk who came up with USB class standards good enough for manufacturers to stick to them! I dunno, maybe that doesn’t seem remarkable to you, but over my 13 years of Linux it’s been a pretty rare occurrence that a new piece of hardware has Just Worked without any special configuration or driver. I didn’t expect it to work in “mouse mode” under Linux for some reason… perhaps because the Xponent comes with “drivers” for OSX and Windows, which are clearly not required for the audio and MIDI support, so what else would they be for?) But as an experiment I did modprobe usbmouse… nothing… then tried modprobe usbhid and was somewhat startled to find that my X cursor was now controllable from the trackpad (as well as from my mouse)… without even having to touch nf. Switch the MIDI light off, and it’s a normal mouse trackpad. When the Xponent’s MIDI button is illuminated, the trackpad functions as a regular MIDI controller, sending Note On/Off for touch/release (and the two buttons), and CCs for X and Y position. My guess is that the second device forwards what has been received at the 5-pin MIDI IN socket, though I haven’t confirmed that yet. The lower of these handles the controls from the Xponent itself. You’ll also get two MIDI devices, which are either numbered 0 and 1, or 1 and 2, depending how you look at them. On my system these are called Xponent Audio #1 and Xponent Audio respectively (note the order - you might have expected them to be the other way around). The Xponent presents two audio devices, representing the main output and the headphones output. If necessary, do modprobe snd_usb_audio, check dmesg, then try amidi -l and aplay -l to show the devices. Both aspects are handled well by the ALSA snd_usb_audio module. The Xponent is a class-compliant USB MIDI and Audio device. In fact you may not even have to manually insert the kernel modules if you have a working udev setup, you might just be able to plug’n’play. YMMV, of course, but the chances are that if you’re using any modern distro you’ll be fine. I use Debian unstable with a hand-rolled kernel. In case any of you who have read my review of the M-Audio Xponent are thinking of getting one and wondering “but will it work under Linux?”, the short answer is a resounding Yes!… except for the LEDs, so far. ![]()
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