A year with the Elgato Stream Deck

As an alternative to a stream deck, I started using a MIDI board last year. I tried a copule and settled on the Behringer X-Touch Mini [1]. It's less than $100. What I primarily use it for is volume control (including muting). Like I have a particular knobs for Chrome, Master Volume and games. This is all pretty easy to set up with something like MIDI Mixer [2]. There are Youtube videos on it.

I also use the media controls for Spotify.

This particular board has extra buttons you can use for, say, muting Zoom.

As an aside, volume on Windows is a horrible mess. You can have an external speaker volume, a system Master volume, an app-specific volume (the last 2 through the Windows Volume Mixer) and then volume settings inside a game.

One thing I appreciate about iOS for example is there's just one volume for what you're doing. There are separate volumes (eg ringer, speaker, music) but you only ever adjust one and it's context-dependent. Listening to music? You adjust music volume. On a call? You're adjusting call volume. Not on a call? You're adjusting ringer volume.

In an ideal world, the hardware volume could be synced to the system master volume and there would be no game or app specific volumes. All of these would be deffered to the volume mixer. Or at least any in-game or in-app controls would merely adjust that volume.

I can but dream.

The only thing this particular board doesn't have is motorized sliders for volume. I didn't really find any options for this less than $300-500 and they tended to be much bigger boards. I'd really prefer a slider to a knob but that's just nit-picking.

[1]: https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0B3M

[2]: https://www.midi-mixer.com/

For someone who kinda wants this stuff but doesn't feel great about spending 200 bucks for 15 buttons and all the garbage that goes with...

an idea I had last week seeing this article is to buy a USB 10-key numpad from a pawn shop, and use something like kmonad[0] to map key presses from that device to specific actions.

Reuse some existing tech, and you can just tape over buttons. It's not exactly the same product for obvious reasons, but I feel like you can do some magic with statusbars and toasts in scripts to get something decent.

[0]: https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad

The plugins can be written in pretty much anything. The system is not fully open, but has a decent interface. It's also been reverse engineered, so there are 3rd party implementations.

If you want to load up a layout / config itself, it's a pretty simple zip file with json files and PNGs. (With some idiosyncrasies like requiring directory entries - that's 4 hours of debugging I'm never getting back)

StreamDeck can be useful in some surprising environments. I've got some custom scripting I'm selling to doctors which helps with common actions in practice software. Things like marking pathology results normal/abnormal/nurse-to-advise, creating a specific referral from a template, or going through a full vaccination record flow (that's 1-2min real time saving per person). It's great :-) (an example config screen https://automate-med.viraptor.info/assets/images/pathology.p... )

I initially got mine for zoom calls but having a display on each key has allowed me to add a couple of different clocks with different time zones in the button. If someone said to me, "that's dumb, you can have a clock on your desktop", I might have agreed with them. But, having the little clocks always in the same place on the desk is really handy.

The other handy one is the mac email notification button, showing how many new emails I have.

I think they are way too expensive for what they are but now I have one, I would probably spend the money again if it got stolen.