Today the idea struck me that a cheap ordinary pc game pad should be able to control stuff in my Ableton Live. I searche youtube for clips and found that it can be done. Without much more thought I went and bought the cheapest game pad at Clas Ohlson (178 SEK). I hooked it up to my MacBook. First tested that it worked with SNES9X and Donkey Kong Country. It worked fine.
Then I launched Live but soon realized that Live itself can only map Keys and Midi to controls. A gamepad’s controls are sent as unique data and not as keyboard/midi data. The solution I realized would be a plugin/application translating the pad’s data to midi. I found my way to junXion. A neat little app for OS X that does just that. Launched it, programmed it and in 10 minutes time I was controlling filters and pitch echos in Live with the analog joysticks of my game pad. A midi controller for under 200 SEK. Try to find that in a music store.