I've repeatedly come across the need to read or write Raster files in Java. These are data files which represent a rectangular grid of data using ASCII representations of numbers. An example, from [1]:

ncols 157
 
nrows 171
 
xllcorner -156.08749650000
 
yllcorner 18.870890200000
 
cellsize 0.00833300
 
nodata_value -9999
 
0 0 1 1 1 2 3 3 5 6 8 9 12 14 18 21 25 30 35 41 47 53
 
59 66 73 79 86 92 97 102 106 109 112 113 113 113 111 109 106

All values can be doubles or ints.

I've been having a fight with Max4Live recently about using midi devices. I'd like to make a gigantic patch which integrates all my control surfaces, and replaces lots of the automap functionality with something that fits my playing style better. The problem is:

• m4l replaces max's midi functionality with its own driver, which takes midi from the Live channel the device is on.
• so you can't use multiple devices in a patch. At least, you can't differentiate them.
• a workaround would be to put each device on a different midi channel, and then separate the midi data inside the patch.