A graphical live-view for chosen controllers for gig-use

posssu · Post by **posssu** » Sat Dec 08, 2007 9:29 pm

How about a global mapping view where you could visually see what's happening in your set (when giggin live)? The idea would be in a way to have similar behaviour what Logic does in it's MainStage-thingie.

Let me illustrate what I mean in this crappy mockup:

This would be a view you could hide or show, depending if you need it or not. You wouldn't actually need to have any difficult programming or some component view where you drag or add controllers- instead the idea would be that you can right-click on any button/controller/track/rack in your Live set and select "Show in live-view" and a big symbol representing the current state of that particular controller would appear in the "live-view" so you would have a big graphical representation of the objects in your set. They should be resizable, depending how big you make of your live-view.

Once more: no need to map anything, it would clearly just reflect the changes in your Live-set on the controllers you decided to show there. A visual extension to global midi mapping.

You would of course be able to reorganize the objects at the top row. My mockup is just really crappy, please don't be disturbed by the appearance.

What do you guys think?

posssu · Post by **posssu** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 4:02 am

No one? Come one, I think this would be awesome! It would be an awesome visual aid when on gig and would enable you to see just the things you want to see, even if they're all around your Live-set.

Meanwhile, I can just drool after Logic's MainStage-feature...

ytsek · Post by **ytsek** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 10:16 am

Good idea.

hoffman2k · Post by **hoffman2k** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 10:52 am

Mainstage sucks from as far as I've played with it.
I'd rather see the ability to natively load max patches into Live to do this.

posssu · Post by **posssu** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 2:30 pm

Why did MainStage suck? Was it difficult to use or why?

synnack · Post by **synnack** » Tue Feb 12, 2008 10:01 pm

I've thought of this kind of thing before. It's cool in theory because it can be annoying to have a bunch of stuff mapped to your controller on stage but not get any visual feedback as to what's going on unless you also click all over the place which can kill the performance.

However after a while of playing using Live I concluded that I actually like it the way it is. I dont' want to end up staring at my computer screen anyway.

No visual feedback forces me to, oh, i dont know, get into it and just play rather than look like i'm playing a video game.

kabuki · Post by **kabuki** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 5:57 am

hoffman2k wrote:Mainstage sucks from as far as I've played with it.
I'd rather see the ability to natively load max patches into Live to do this.

1st thing Mr. 2k has ever posted on this forum that I disagree with. Completely.

A fantastic feature (in a fantastic app) is Mainstage's GUI customizability. You can decide what you do and don't want to see on screen, where it is placed, and what size and importance it has. BEAUTIFULLY realized idea for the performer.And you don't have to be a programmer to use it. Unlike Max.

Great idea, OP.

If you don't want to look at it, don't.

bensuthers · Post by **bensuthers** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:04 am

get a controller with visual feedback.

hoffman2k · Post by **hoffman2k** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 8:35 am

kabuki wrote:
hoffman2k wrote:Mainstage sucks from as far as I've played with it.
I'd rather see the ability to natively load max patches into Live to do this.
1st thing Mr. 2k has ever posted on this forum that I disagree with. Completely.

A fantastic feature (in a fantastic app) is Mainstage's GUI customizability. You can decide what you do and don't want to see on screen, where it is placed, and what size and importance it has. BEAUTIFULLY realized idea for the performer.And you don't have to be a programmer to use it. Unlike Max.

Great idea, OP.

If you don't want to look at it, don't.

You don't need to be a programmer to learn max.
As far as I understood Mainstage, it seemed like "pretty macros" like in Live.
I'd prefer some more flexibility then just seeing a knob, a button and a keyboard.

posssu · Post by **posssu** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 4:34 pm

I'd love to see something like MainStage, this was just one idea. The point is just to be able to see at one glance what's happening and what values the most important parameters have, what's the name of the current scene, previous and next too etc etc. A Live-view for Live.

There's so much stuff happening in Live's window and in different tracks that no matter how intuitive the interface is, it just doesn't show everything at once glance. And there should be an option to do this for gigging musicians, to selectively see what you really need.

kabuki · Post by **kabuki** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 4:44 pm

hoffman2k wrote: You don't need to be a programmer to learn max.
As far as I understood Mainstage, it seemed like "pretty macros" like in Live.
I'd prefer some more flexibility then just seeing a knob, a button and a keyboard.

Max is a TON more complex that the average musician can understand. Mainstage is very much a bunch of pretty macros (like live) that can be organized and scaled to the user's liking. Really simple and straight-forward.

Max is a very abstract environment that has a rediculous learning curve even for the most simple tasks. It is very much a powerful and useful tool, but at the expense of accessability.

One of Live's best assests is its ease-of-use and accessability. It would be a very good thing for Live to keep that as a trait.

hoffman2k · Post by **hoffman2k** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 5:37 pm

Yeah. You prefer really simple and straight-forward, thus limited like mainstage.
I prefer modularity, flexibility and clarity.

I dunno what you got against max msp, but its not as complex as it looks.
To build something like mainstage, you probably don't even need to look past the 15th tutorial.. Its a few knobs responding to a CC. Hardly rocket science and pretty useless for my purposes. Your milage may vary.
You wouldn't even have to build it because that ultimately the point of native support of max patches in Live. People will share their patches.

divonic · Post by **divonic** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 5:54 pm

I wouldn't have a problem with this if you could hide it. If it was always up there it would annoy me.

kabuki · Post by **kabuki** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:26 pm

hoffman2k wrote:Yeah. You prefer really simple and straight-forward, thus limited like mainstage.
I prefer modularity, flexibility and clarity.

I dunno what you got against max msp, but its not as complex as it looks.
To build something like mainstage, you probably don't even need to look past the 15th tutorial.. Its a few knobs responding to a CC. Hardly rocket science and pretty useless for my purposes. Your milage may vary.
You wouldn't even have to build it because that ultimately the point of native support of max patches in Live. People will share their patches.

Seems to me that Mainstage IS very clear and flexible.

If limited means easy, so be it. I didn't need to read a manual or tutorial to figure it out in Mainstage. I just made it happen, then I was able to get to making music and customizing patches right away. Native support in Live would be great. I'm all for it. For the sake of those that want to take advantage of MAX and have the time or experience in such things. I don't. My my time is limited, as is my interest in Max programming. I would rather be making noise.

RE: Divonic. Like with all Live functionality, I too would like the ability to view or not view this particular feature. I figured that was a given.

kabuki · Post by **kabuki** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 6:48 pm