thawkins

What I tell for street cred: "Oh, don't but a Prophet, I broke one when cleaning the PCB with alcohol." What actually happened: "I finally managed to make a sound that was not a fucked up helicopter, got carried away and spilled craft beer all over the ADSR section." Edit: obligatory GAS: CF to SD adapter and fat pads for the MPC1000.

How about some realtime sysexin, moses?

Thanks, this may be useful. I feel like the problem with any kind of alternative communication methods is that within Ableton, the audio and MIDI are handled generally as first class citizens - nobody would be using Live if there were any issues with audio or MIDI losing connection inside Live itself during playing. But hand-rolled M4L devices - especially this kind of workarounds - are not first class. Setting up a TCP communication server or other side-channels is kind of sketchy to me, even though it probably works well in 99% of the cases. I think it's my day job is to do with troubleshooting and debugging connection problems and I want none of that in the music hobby part of my life. ? By the way, I did a test drive with the HarmoTools Chord-ChordFilter devices on the live stream yesterday and I have mixed feelings. Initially, the devices work fine, and it's probably more of my problem that my chord knowledge is so sparse that I messed up and did not play the correct chords. However at some point I think the devices lost connection with each other and I had the "controller" device stuck in C maj no matter what I played. This may be related to some stuck MIDI notes on that channel, but it's annoying that there is no simple "clear state" button on the device itself. I also think that my idea is to be more chord-scale agnostic. I play a chord of some 4-5 notes and the other tracks would just repitch the notes to the nearest matching ones (with the exception of the bass part that should be capped below some pitch to keep the lows in their place). I think I need some more experimentation to see if I can just use those devices or I need to roll my own.

Yeah, if it's a separate patch, it's already close to something that I had with the standalone Pure Data patch I had for turning note information into CC. This looks like something I could use, thanks!

Hello Max heads, I am trying to figure out a new paradigm changing M4L device (yeah, right :eyeroll motion:), I thought I would ask this thread for tips. The basic idea is that I need to have a MIDI device running on a track in Ableton that is looping some MIDI (or just accepting input from a keyboard or whatever source). Let's say this is the "carrier" track. Then I need to have that MIDI device (on the "carrier signal" track) receive incoming MIDI from another Live track. Let's call this one "modulator". The practical use case I have in mind is recording a MIDI loop on the "carrier" track, and then transposing/forcing all the pitches to be what I play on the "modulator" track. I have hacked something like this together with a janky Pure Data thing - and its super fun to play - but now its time to up the level and do it all in M4L. I know that a M4L device can only accept MIDI from one channel, so I guess the main technical blocker for this thing is figuring out some way to have the "modulator" and the "carrier" devices communicate with each other. Well, as a dumb workaround I think the "modulator" can just send the pitch values in a reserved range like the C-2 octave, or I could figure out some hacky hack to convert the incoming noteons to CC messages that the "carrier" decodes to a set of pitches. The 2nd difficult part to figure out is how to repitch the notes on the "carrier" track. In my previous experiments I used the Scale device to force everything into the "correct" notes. I do not really want to reimplement that device in M4L, so I wonder if its possible to somehow make my "carrier" device just be paired with a Scale device by way of some automation mapping hooks or something. I am also like 99% sure someone already built a thing like this, but I can't find anything like this online (and of course I have not really tried either ? ). Thanks in advance for any pointers.

You should take a trip into the TidalCycles thread, because at least in the software level this sort of thing is implemented there. However, as a programmer, I found out that I can't stand to look at code in my free time.

Yeah that's why the industry standard solution is to build a RAID system where the data is automatically duplicated between many HDDs. Regular SMART checks ensure that if a drive starts to fail, you get a warning and can replace the failing drive in the array. The system handles rebalancing the data automatically. If two drives fail simultaneously, you might be screwed, but a) that's much more rare than 1 drive failing and b) you can set up a RAID that can tolerate 2 drive failures. Also a good rule of thumb is: if you did not test recovering from your backups, you might not really have backups once shit hits the fan. And yeah echoing the strategy of keeping the backups physically separate with a few plans B.

I think the point to keep in mind for SSD long time retention is that if you do weekly-daily backups, it's likely a good measure against this degradation. On the other hand, old school spinning drives are much much much more cheaper for the size, so setting up a managed NAS with RAID will get you a nice reliable backup solution that will keep on trucking and let you know if some disk is about to fail or not. Or you can just pay a service like Backblaze to take care of it. ?

I feel like if you have a reasonably modern computer, the samples that you actively use in the project will be loaded into memory, so no need to set a special hard drive for samples and libraries. Basically for me the best way boils down to this: if you have a SSD system disk and you have an external SSD (Thunderbolt or USB 3), then it makes sense to assign the external drive to audio recording and file caching. All the other setups are probably more useful if you have an absolutely massive User Library and your system disk is not big enough to have space for it. And yeah finally backups are always important, but this can be handled by your operating system too - just get a solid Western Digital external HDD and have Windows or Macos handle the rest.

If this is a standalone patch, you could just run it in Max and integrate with Live through routing MIDI and audio inside your computer. What operating system are you on? For Macos, the keywords for doing this are "IAC driver" (built-in virtual MIDI routing) and Soundflower (routing audio between apps using a kernel module). This is what I would do anyway if I had a standalone Max or Pure Data patch that is too much hassle to port into M4L.

Time to convert all you have to 8-bit chiptunes.

Sometimes it's inspiring to check out used hardware too, even if you don't end up getting anything, browsing used listings at sub 100-200€ can reveal some amazingly crappy but inspiring stuff.

Listening to inspiring music beats listening to gear reviews IMO. Especially if you already have a pile of gear that can do a lot of stuff.

I think current WiFi technology can handle the latency and throughput, but bluetooth definitely is a standard that has mostly a bad rep when it comes to reliable implementations and connection quality and pairing. I think that CME WIDI will work, but probably the latency won't be comparable to a physical cable. This 2 years old video is proving me wrong badly though... And here am I with my wireless Apple Magic mouse that can't keep a connection over 1 meter.

Who do you think will be spared from execution in the coming water wars - the guy who knows how to make a techno sound on a Monomachine using param locks or the guy who can sync two Akai Timberwolves over TRS MIDI? Choose wisely!

Also we might be at a point where an increasing amount of old gear will a) be copycatted and released by behringer (with newest tech additions) or b) virtualized/modeled entirely from the circuit board up, so it's more and more possible just to have your things talk in whatever way necessary, and MIDI and CV is just the barest fallback that you have using physical cables.

I don't doubt that it will be a lot of manual work, but I feel like it is a more realistic scenario to expect volunteers over the world share mappings to their gear (just look at the public Max 4 Live patches library for an example) compared to expecting manufacturers correctly implementing a complicated specification (just look at Bluetooth audio for example). Having said that, my knowledge of MIDI 2.0 is 2 minutes of googling and seeing that the official spec mentions protocol handshakes, which to me means it would be a nonserial protocol and that's already way more complicated than existing MIDI. Ditto for the other advanced functions. The main issue is probably that there's not a lot of MIDI enthusiasts who care about this AND don't already have their gear sorted out in a way that works for them. So why should manufacturers care about implementing this new standard in a compatible way? I feel like big synth makers today are more likely to adopt deliberately incompatible standards so that KORG has some fancy thing on all their gear that Roland does not and vice versa. Happy to be proven wrong though. ?

If the main blocker is harmonizing MIDI implementations between different types of gear, I think this is easily technically solvable by having some interpreter layer(s) where you say "OK this MIDI file that I am about to load is meant for a Korg MS2000, but what I have is a Roland JV1080" and then it'll translate the CCs to rough equivalents. This won't ever 100% work for stuff like SysEx, but it will definitely get to the same ballpark. It will get murky anyway at the point where one synth may have 2 filters-oscillators and another has 3, but messing around with my gear I have the impression that basic CCs like volume, pan, attack, release, cutoff, resonance are quite standard.

What about a Donglebots Loopalizer?

Yeah the field kit even has a fm radio built in. It’s only a matter of hooking the stuff up.

That's pretty much what the Koma Field Kit does already, except it has some extra stuff too. I really should set it up somewhere, because I have such a wonderful pile of small gear to play with: Volca Sample, Yamaha QY100, Bastl Kastle, nanoloop (on an iPhone). I also have a crappy Zoom bass multieffects unit to add some atmosphere to all of it.

The Studiolive 24R is basically something like that, except not in desk format. It's just the inputs and outputs and for all the rest you have to mess with in the Universal Control application or get an iPad like all the pro sound guys. So it's great for setting up mixes and then playing forever, but not for messing around with faders and eqs while playing.

Bringing this topic back into the GAS mode though, I kind of want a standalone mixer that would give me a dialled in submix and it would be easier to hook up all the small loosely joined things. I think this would be nice to have in improvised jam sessions. I think I owe it to the Koma Field Kit to try it out as a mixer like this. It's got that perfect small form factor and some other fun stuff too. And since it's only a mono output, it can't get too complicated either. Let's see if I get further with this plan or it just remains a post I made.

That's cool. My experience with small things loosely joined is that most of the small things end up in the cupboard gathering dust, while the two things I use are hooked up like that permanently. Every 6 months I make a half assed attempt to recable something, but then the setup usually ends up back like it was: a Roland XV5080 and Korg MS2000R rack unit going to a Presonus Studiolive 24R, and getting all the MIDI from Ableton Live.