Touchscreen recomendations please

I am thinking of restarting with Cantabile after a long break, and have recently purchased an Intel NUC i7 8th Gen BOXNUC8I7HNK and I am looking for small (up to 14") touchscreen monitor that will work with it and Cantabile.
We cannot get GeChic monitors down here, but there are lots of others…what would the recommended requirements be? for example 16:4 1080 resolution etc…

I am asking for suggestions as to what brands and models are best/most compatible.

Thanks

Shame you cannot get the GeChic monitors as they are very good. Can you not order internationally?

Yeah I could, but adding the very high shipping charges and then ad conversion and it becomes ridiculously expensive.

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Fair point, if it makes it unviable.

The other option is can you use a tablet and Cantabile’s web interface?

Or, I have tried accessing the computer via remote desktop (e.g. use a Surface tablet or iPAD to do that), and found that that was fine as well. An iPAD and remote desktop is my backup for the GeChic.

Thanks Derek - I might even look at the remote desktop as a backup anyway…can you explain in further detail how you accomplished it, please?

With my live cube, I use a relatively cheap Elecrow 10 inch full HD touchscreen (got it from Amazon) set on top of a microphone stand with a simple VESA adapter by K&M. Works nicely - but I don’t control a lot of my Cantabile setup with the touch screen. Essentially, I just use the touchscreen to launch Cantabile and maybe use the control bar for switching views etc - that works with my clumsy fingers :wink:

Powers via the USB-C connection (also for touch), video via HDMI.

When I do editing, I usually connect via Teamviewer from my office PC. I set up my live cube as a “known device” in Teamviewer, so my office PC can connect to it without any ID/password hassle. Works great, with very little CPU overhead. I’ve tried other options - far more CPU impact, so I’m staying with Teamviewer.

Cheers,

Torsten

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Thanks Torsten - as it is a NUC, I’ll need to be able to control most of the “live play” functions, so a solid touchscreen will be needed IE no qwerty or mouse (that I’d have with a laptop).

I use this with my NUC (Intel Skull Canyon NUC6I7KYK)

Just one cable (USB-C) for touch and power. It also has a usb through connection so I can use a mouse if I need finer control. I used to use my Surface Pro connected via ethernet to the NUC (which sits inside my organ setup) but I once had a startup problem and had no way to see what was going on as it couldn’t connect if the NUC wasn’t on! Mostly it worked fine but that one experience shortly before a gig was enough to tell me I needed a more direct screen connection. It saved having an extra power supply inside the setup as well.

It’s 13.3" so I just rotate it and it’s perfect for reading music. I rarely have to change anything in Cantabile when playing live but even if I do Cantabile in portrait mode is still readable.

Paul

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Thanks Paul - I’ll see if that one is available down here.

Remote Desktop is a standard application on all PCs that allow you to log in remotely to a another PC and access it via the keyboard/video/mouse of the computer you are at.

So I use it in a lot of places

  • Accessing my Cantabile PC from my DAW PC in the studio instead of the GeChic
  • Sometimes on a nice summers day, when I want to do some development work as well, I will setup the DAW PC and remote desktop from my general laptop
  • And as a backup for the GeChic, I have the RDP APP on my iPAD as the backup

To use RDP, you just need the IP address of the computer (or its workgroup name) and your login credentials. Start RDP on your remote computer or ipad and enter the credentials.

One thing to remember is once you have the connection setup, enter the preferences to keep the sound on the NUC

cooly thanks - I somehow had the notion it was a little more arcane than that :slight_smile:

I’ll research a little more.

I have this one that works perfectly. Be carrefull, you will need a usb C port to get the tactile functionnality.

Thanks for the link - looks nice

It is pretty easy.

See following links

Thanks Derek

One thing of note that I didn’t see anyone mention here. In order for a PC to accept Remote Desktop Connections, it must be running Windows Pro or Enterprise editions, Windows Home won’t let you enable remote desktop legally.

There are alternative solutions you can use on Windows Home, e.g. any of the VNC flavors (UltraVNC, TightVNC, RealVNC). All of those require you to install a server component on the machine that you want to remote-control, which you connect to using a viewer component on your other machine.

TeamViewer uses a similar approach, but it also provides some back-end services to authenticate and manage access to the machines you want to remote-control. TeamViewer is frequently used by software companies for remote support, allowing service agents to access your machine remotely.

What I dislike about Windows Remote Desktop (and why I don’t use it even though I have Win 10 Pro on my audio machines): when you remote-control a machine with it, the local screen is locked, only the remote screen shows the content. When you close the remote session, you have to re-login to your local machine. So you can’t see the desktop on both machines at the same time.

The alternative solutions like VNC all allow you to do this - they mirror your screen content to the remote-control machine, so I can work normally on my touch screen and at the same time have a remote session open on my PC for editing and any detailed fiddling.

All these solutions have one thing in common: they need to copy your screen content and send it to your remote machine via the network - this will cause CPU load and some latency, especially over Wifi. Since I don’t want to degrade my audio performance massively with my remote desktop solution, I have tested a number of solutions on my Live Cube now, and I’ve found that TeamViewer is so far the one with the lowest CPU impact and with a minimum of hassle. Plus, it’s free for personal use.

Cheers,

Torsten

Yes this was another question I was going to ask, more to Derek as he uses the system…can I use Ethernet for this or is it only possible via wi-fi and the inherent (sometimes) issues that introduces?

Hi, I have used both Ethernet and WIFI. I use Ethernet between my Gig PC and DAW PC when they are in the studio and I have also used my phone as a hot spot to connect the Gig PC to an iPAD. Can’t say I noticed any performance issues (don’t forget that remote desktop only sends the changes) but I have not looked at it in the detail that Torsten has.

Torsten is also correct in that the local display gets locked with Microsoft’s built-in RDP, but that has never bothered me, and if I am using remote desktop live, then it is because the GeChic has failed.

Whether or not you use Microsoft’s built in RDP or one of the alternatives suggested by Torsten will be a matter of choice.

Oh and I do have WIN10 PRO

Cool…yeah good use of the hotspot, that’d work…W10Pro for me too