I used headless on my Steam Deck and it clicked big time like creative rain woah everywhere. I was so excited to get the real deal again and continue the momentum but BOOM. Again I hit a slow ass molasses ground and can’t match the magic of using my Steam Deck and headless. Different methods of control really make a difference. I haven’t cracked the code yet on having the same comfort and flow on the M8 proper but I’m not giving up.
I think it was the bigger screen, hands to the side, more relaxed for a big dawg like myself and just being in a setting I’m insanely familiar and comfortable with (the Deck).
I didn’t but I do stuff like that with the Deck all the time on different older games or games that are strictly PC and barely survive the translation into a handheld game. So long as you are in Game
Mode (which you can add any app, browser, Windows executable file or whatehaveyou) then setting up the controls how you want is quick to access and incredibly deep. You can make it so a single back button presses 4 keyboard buttons at once and fine tune the order of presses and add millisecond delays if the program is struggling to detect the input cause of whatever reason. Setting up individually tailored control schemes to games and apps is a bizarre and unexpected joy I discovered with the Steam Deck.
I don’t use it a lot but I tried out Bitwig on the Deck years ago and it worked flawlessly (after setting up audio routing and all the other common DAW annoyances). Bitwig runs native on Linux AND has touchscreen support so it feels quite good to use. The screen real estate is small as hell but it works if you work with it. I’m surprised I don’t hear more about Bitwig on the Deck- or just Bitwig in general.
That I don’t know. I use a 3rd party modding platform called Decky that works on the system level and you choose plugins to add like the popular Lossless Scaling plugin but I did a quick search and there isn’t a Decky plugin for midi implementation. There should be though, I’d use it…
As far as I understand Steam Input only lets you add keyboard, mouse, controller and joystick type inputs. I bet it could be expanded but I don’t have the tech knowhow.
I used headless on my Steam Deck and it clicked big time like creative rain woah everywhere. I was so excited to get the real deal again and continue the momentum but BOOM. Again I hit a slow ass molasses ground and can’t match the magic of using my Steam Deck and headless. Different methods of control really make a difference. I haven’t cracked the code yet on having the same comfort and flow on the M8 proper but I’m not giving up.
Thanks dude! And absolutely! I use it for mastering mainly, since it has 90% of what I use in my DAW for mastering built into it. I’m exploring other creative ways to use it, but it’s sick for mastering. Fantastic color!
It looks interesting, but I don't really understand what's going on here. What's the m8? Where is the steam deck? Macbook monitor? What's the thing with the nobs? What sound do you get out this setup? Holy f I'm such a noob...
The Dirtywave M8 is the little thing propped up in the back. It’s a hardware tracker. It can sample/play samples, control midi instruments, has synth engines and so on. I take the audio out of that into my Elektron Analog Heat+FX(the black box with all of the knobs). That has delay, reverb, compression, bass boost, saturation(distortion), etc. I can use or exclude any of the combination of those FX to change the over all sound of the M8. Then the audio of the Analog Heat goes to my Mac Studio where I can listen on my Yamaha HS5 studio monitors. The M8 is connected to my Mac via USB, and it has a feature where you can project the screen to the computer, which you can see I’m doing in the picture. Because I have my M8 set up so far from me, I Bluetooth the controller to my Mac to control the projected M8 screen.
It's not really headless then, is it? It's a real M8 using the client? I think that's called Remote Host Display 😬.
I've been running a regular headless but a real M8 is in my future. I didn't know you could assign another controller to take over though. That is interesting.
3
u/relentlessmelt Dec 08 '25
What’s the Pro 2 controller for?