Just got myself a big touch screen, mounted it on a VESA arm thingy that allows me to put it anywhere at any angle so I can have it right under my nose while playing keyboard.

This is awesome, only thing that puts a dent in the awesomeness is that knobs and fader reactions in Sonar are erratic and hard to control, but I can use the mouse for that for now. It's the same thing that happens when I tried to use my Wacom Intuos4.

Still have to do a bit of tweaking, where I point is slightly off, so hitting very small UI elements is hard, but I think it's just a calibration issue.

Been using it all day, it's just so natural and intuitive to use, no controller setup, just point and go.

If Sonar gets faders and knobs to behave correctly... bye bye control surfaces, because they will be obsolete.

Quite honestly I can think of noting worse than sat round poking a screen with my fingers all day long.

To my mind, it's one surefire way of exacerbating any upper limb disorder.

Bristol_Jonesey


Quite honestly I can think of noting worse than sat round poking a screen with my fingers all day long.

To my mind, it's one surefire way of exacerbating any upper limb disorder.

Having never tried a touch screen with a DAW, I still dare to agree. I just can not imagine a touch screen that would not cause health problems. Of course, my imagination may be failing me :o/
I have used a touch screen for other purposes, with relatively few buttons on the screen, and the propability of mis****s was annoyingly big. And the troublesome thing is you really have to stare at the screen to find out if you've hit a wrong button, because the screen gives no response to the finger. 
 
If the screen is so small, that you can rest your wrist on the side, the display is too small to contain enough functions, if it's big enough to hold all the functions needed for fluent work, keeping your arms lifted for hours will surely cause problems. Human fingertips are simply too thick compared to a cursor arrow.
 
I can't imagine editing audio clips or volume envelopes on a touch screen.
 
But I don't mind if I'm one day proved to be wrong in this.

I hear ya Jonesey, I was thinking the same thing when I had an older touchscreen a while ago. (I have carpel tunnel, so my joints are always hurting a bit, numb fingers etc..)

It was a fun curiosity for a while, but then sitting around waving my arms in they air got tedious and I never used it.

What changed everything this time was mounting it on the vesa arm, I can pull it back/forward, up/down, and change the horizontal and vertical angle.

Now I can position it like any other control surface and use it the same way as any other control surface like my BCR2000s, only there's no setup to do and no two way communication to worry about.

I wonder if the upcoming patch for Win8 compatibility in X2 will cater for touch as well. I love using a Wacom pen with my DAW but using it on faders and knobs in Sonar is pretty much impossible. I can imagine it's the same with touch screens even though I haven't used one with Sonar. The principles behind them are pretty simmilar. Here's hoping that this will be remedied and that Sonar will be readied for touch and with that, get good fader and knob response when using a pen tablet.

I use a graphics tablet and pen myself. Great for graphical editing pitch/timing. +1 on making the fader and knob response better.

Same, I love my Wacom Intuos4 but it's the same deal with the knobs and faders, very jittery, it's not only Sonar, pretty much all DAWs I've tried has this problem, same with games, using a pen would be great but they just go nuts when you're not using a mouse.

I think touch screens uses the same input method as tablets.