Wireless MIDI Control with Apple Watch MIDIWRIST app is a Reality

It’s taken three years in the making, and finally, Apple’s recent Watch models allow you to control MIDI gear by remotely playing, stop recording, and rewinding your DAW from your watch. The app MidiWrist will allow you to wirelessly control synthesisers and other MIDI-controllable sound sources.

The MidiWrist app makes no sound on its own and obviously will require an Apple Watch to function. Any CoreMIDI application with built-in MIDI support available on Mac OS X including KORG Module, KORG Gadget 2, Apple GarageBand and other music applications can be controlled by MidiWrist. This also includes Virtual MIDI, Network MIDI, Bluetooth MIDI and Physical MIDI devices through a supported MIDI hardware interface. It has been reported that a forthcoming update will add Siri compatibility.

The app’s creator, Geert Bevin, provides this insight into its creation; “In a way, this app has been more than three years in the making. I got the first Apple Watch in the hope of creating this, but the technology was way too slow without a direct real-time communication protocol between the Watch and the iPhone. I’ve been watching every Watch release up until the last one, Series 4.

The customer reception was so good overall, that I decided to give this another go and only after a few hours of prototyping, I could see that this would now work and feel great, and here we are. I did buy a Watch Series 3 afterwards also to include in my testing during development.”

It will be interesting to see how much of uptake there will be with this new application. Let us know your comments below.

Check out the wrist-on video demo.

Features

• Four knobs can be controlled with the digital crown
• Macro control over multiple synth parameters from the digital crown
• Remotely Play / Stop / Record / Rewind your DAW from your Watch
• Knobs can be controlled individually or simultaneously
• Knobs can be linked to preserve their offsets
• Four buttons can be toggled by tapping the Watch
• Buttons can either be stateful or momentary
• Program changes through the digital crown or by tapping the  Watch
• Transport control over Midi Machine Control (MMC)
• XY pad with individual messages for each axis
• Optional haptic feedback for all Watch interactions
• Optional value display on the Watch
• Configurable colours for all knobs and buttons
• Configurable MIDI channels and CC numbers
• Save your configurations to preset for easy retrieval
• MIDI learn for easy controller configuration
• MIDI input to sync the state of the controllers with the controlled synths
• Advertise as a Bluetooth MIDI device
• Connect to other Bluetooth MIDI devices
• Monitor the MIDI values on the iPhone
• Low latency and fast response

Web: http://uwyn.com/midiwrist