noob questions

[ianf39]

I've looked around quite a bit and can't seem to find some straight forward answers so I figured I'd just bite the bullet and ask people who know what they're doing... I'm brand new to Live and looking into the functionality of the Akai controllers and the Novation Launchpad and I realize these questions may be totally simple but please bear with me. What I want to know is, do these controllers play audio and midi clips or just midi? And, is it possible to have say the Launchpad plugged in USB on bus power and a Firewire interface (Echo AudioFire 4) plugged in on bus power at the same time feeding into Live? Are there problems that arise from using more than one bus powered piece of equipment at once? (I have a 15" MBP Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM, not sure but i think 2.5Ghz)

What I would ultimately like to do is record a dozen or so guitar clips in Live through the audio interface - tweak them in Live- and then play those clips from a Launchpad or APC. Or for live performance application play some guitar samples into Live and make a loop which I can than immediately trigger with the Launchpad? Is this possible? And if so can I also add a drum rack to the Launchpad to play over the looping audio clips? And supposing all this works, can I have the audio routed to come out of my inteface to my monitors?

Thanks for reading, any help would be greatly appreciated.

[outershpongolia]

I'm pretty sure you can do all of that.. it's not always as straight forward as it seems, but then it's not always as complicated as it seems either..

[ianf39]

cool, if it can be done i'll figure it out. thanks for the quick response

[myxomat0515]

Yes, all of this can be done. Both will launch MIDI and audio clips. I would avoid connecting your interface through a bus if possible, but if you don't have a choice I'm sure it will still work. I'm not familiar with that interface. You can easily launch clips and control a drum rack just using the basic user modes of the launchpad, but the drum rack pads are not velocity sensitive, so don't expect much expression. That can be compensated for in the drum rack controls though.

And supposing all this works, can I have the audio routed to come out of my inteface to my monitors?

Yes?

[ianf39]

Excellent! thank you for the responses ShelLuser and myxomat0515. The more I learn about Live the more it sounds like the biggest limitations are what you bring to it. The AudioFire does have a wall wart so i'll just suck it up and use that to make sure there aren't any issues.

The only problem is figuring out which controller to get