steamControllerSynth

Turning Valve's Steam Controller into a fully functional Synth, compatible with MIDI files and input devices with full polyphony

Continuing off of Pila's work, steamControllerSynth expands and enables the playback of MIDI data from both MIDI files and live playback from input devices. Instead of being limited to one voice per channel, and two total channels, this script implements a dynamically allocating queue in order to fully saturate all haptic motors connected to the computer enabling full polyphony for every MIDI channel, limited only by the amount of Steam Controllers available.

Prerequisites

This script relies on a Python 3+ installation and the following dependencies:

pip install mido
pip install pyusb

Windows

Unfortunately, Windows does not have an easy way to install libusb unlike Unix based operating systems. If libusb is not already present you will need to:

1. pip install pyusb
2. pip install libusb
3. libusb-1.0.dll will be automatically added to:

PYTHON_DIR\Lib\site-packages\libusb_platform_windows\x64 and PYTHON_DIR\Lib\site-packages\libusb_platform_windows\x32

For example in my case, my PYTHON_DIR that has my \Lib\ folder is C:\Users\adria\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\

Now add those paths (the full path) to Windows Path and restart your terminal.

Original Solution

More resources on adding to Windows Path

Linux

If libusb is not already present on your device, you can install via the following command on debian based distributions.

sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0-dev

Usage

steamControllerSynth has various different modes it can be used in:

Synth

This is the default mode, and the primary reason I wrote this script.

The following command claims a Steam Controller interface on all available steam controllers available and then binds it to the default MIDI input port on the host computer. Through this, the script can interpret MIDI data from a keyboard and send it to the Steam Controller in order to act as a live synthesizer.

python steamcontrollersynth.py

File Playback

Just as Pila's SteamControllerSinger, steamControllerSynth can also playback MIDI files on the Steam Controller's haptic motors. In order to specify a file to playback utilize the -f or --file argument

py steamcontrollersynth.py '.\test.mid'

Miscellaneous Options

Backend logic

Logic backends can be changed via the -l or --logic argument.

• single_voice - A legacy option, most closely matches Pila's original implementation. Every haptic touchpad is assigned a MIDI channel, and it plays the most recent note in the channel. This supports up to 16 single-voice MIDI channels. (8 Steam Controllers)
• polyphony - Mandatory for live synth and the default for other use cases, every haptic touchpad is included in a dynamically allocating queue that scales with Steam Controller to enable single channel polyphony in addition to pulling midi data from all channels. Recommended for best quality when more haptic touchpads are present than maximum polyphony.

py steamcontrollersynth.py -l single_voice 'test.mid'

py steamcontrollersynth.py -l polyphony 'test.mid'

Midi Input

In order to use a different MIDI input port apart from the default, you can specify which to use with the -m -midi_input_port argument.

py steamcontrollersynth.py -m 'USB MIDI Controller 0'

The list of available MIDI input ports is available within the help section.

Help

Additional bundled help is available through the following command:

py steamcontrollersynth.py -h