anybody wants a free midi looper ?

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turrican
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anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by turrican » Tue Jun 05, 2012 4:24 pm

Hi!

Month ago I finished wirting a standalone midi looper and played with it some gigs since and it was real fun.
Its based on max and java and is available as built pc executable - just download it
and use it (I called it midiBrain). I motivated myself to write a manual and make some tutorial vids that its usefull
for anybody (hopefully). If you want to use it on a mac you have to do certain steps in order
to make it run with the Cycling '74 runtime (in this case contact me or we discuss it here).

It's nothing fancy about it but I tried to make it usefull/robust for live playing/jamming.
It was not really intended to use with Live but besides noteon's and pitchbend you can loop
midi which is mapped to Live's native parameters - it's real fun if you missed that functionality in session view.

The looper is based on beats of a transport (internal/external), can be synced to a rewire host and midi clock.
It has 'undo' functionality. The program functions can be mapped to midi events (like a key 'C0' for record/play/overdub)
and some more functionality.
Best thing is you watch the videos and find out If you want to use it.

I made a simple WP-blog - there you can find the download and the videos. Its called 'midiBrain.
The PDF amnual is in the ZIP-Archive of the download.
The link:
http://systemexklusiv.wordpress.com/

I'm very curious how it runs for you!

stoersignal
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by stoersignal » Tue Jun 05, 2012 4:51 pm

which part you can`t do with live alone?

turrican
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by turrican » Tue Jun 05, 2012 5:23 pm

you can
1.feed the midi events from your controller in it which are mapped to Live's parameter,
like the frequency of an autofilter. You can loop the controller movements (as well as noteons etc. ->all midi)
while you are performing in session view. Live's native parameters like it's effects, instruments etc. can't be looped
unless you do some weired event routing or record the modulations in arrangement view and copy/paste them to the clip-
2. you can send program changes for all 16 channels to Live on the fly in order to change programs of VSTi's and VSTfx's.
You can assign f.i. midi for triggering program change increment/decrement and channel inc/dec so that you can (like in the video) switch quickly through instruments/programs with the same midi keyboard you play the instruments.


This are just 2 examples. The advantage is that the looper sits in front of the application and can record all midi commands, data1 data2.
The video on the blog (direct youtube: http://youtu.be/jtlti8hiuCk) shows a quick demo of doing 1. and 2.
But Live is not mandatory it's just that live is a rewire host and lacks of native parameter looping. You can use the looper 'midiBrain' with your epiano solely.

stoersignal
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by stoersignal » Thu Jun 07, 2012 8:51 pm

you can do all that inside live! you can record midiCC or PC in clips you just need IAC-driver and one ore more additional tracks for recording the data.
yes, it`s just a workaround, but as its yours

barstu
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by barstu » Fri Jun 08, 2012 12:56 am

That's pretty cool, I'd be interested in this if I can use as a M4L device. Yes Live can do midi loops and audio loops at the moment but still, a dedicated device (like Looper) is handy.

turrican
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by turrican » Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:04 pm

you can do all that inside live! you can record midiCC or PC in clips you just need IAC-driver and one ore more additional tracks for recording the data.
@stoersignal
Yes, you can do that somehow in live but you'd have to have for each outgoing channel a sepperate track wich is kind of cumbersome to handle It´all lies in Live's midi restrictions. Imagine a screnario where you want to quickly record some encoder movements sending CC on f.i. 4 sepperate channels to control on different 2 synths filters, the feedback amount of an external effect and the dry/wet balance of an insert effect while still able to change each device's program (all receiving on a diffrent channel). With midiBrain you can do that instantly - as its a big midi event container without Live's restriction because it sits in front of the SW. The same is true for PC - which is inside Live just track-per-channel wise possible. If you want to play in midi loops intuitivly, not by doing a lot of back and forth routing chaos (with creative midi feedback breakdowns :)) its best in my opinion to do all the midi bytes mangling firsthand and feed it ready formated to Live's track and/or remote in. If you do that you can use each track's input selector for routing events by channel (like f.i. PC to a VSTi/fx) or record easily some native paramters. To me it was important to have one button for record/play/overdub, undo-functionality and to make it possible to delete recorded events in my looper on a per channel basis. My goal was to make a tool for jamming live with midi events. But this is just my understanding of how improvising with midi is more fun - BTW this is also very interesting and It'd like to hear what functionality other musicians are missing in the first place.
yes, it`s just a workaround, but as its yours
In case of Live, yes that would be my workaround to record Live's parameters while playing in session view. But a a few hours ago I return from a session where I used midiBrain just to loop some notes triggering a baselines and some chords while looking for a guitar&flute theme.. so It's not dedicated solely to Live more to looping midi in general
That's pretty cool, I'd be interested in this if I can use as a M4L device. Yes Live can do midi loops and audio loops at the moment but still, a dedicated device (like Looper) is handy.
@barstu
Like I mentioned above in my opinion a midi looper tool like mine is more powerful if it's not integrated in Live. A M4L device has just the events which are forwared from Live to the track, as it' written in the C'74 docs : "MIDI input arrives from Live and MIDI output is sent to Live"http://cycling74.com/docs/max5/vignette ... tions.html which is summerized you are not independent and due to Live's internal midi you can just loop on one channel (just send PC on one channel etc.). Just give it a try and you'll find out that midiwise it's much easier to have an external app (and of course I'm curious if it runs well on other systems;)).

JuanSOLO
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by JuanSOLO » Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:29 pm

turrican wrote:It'd like to hear what functionality other musicians are missing in the first place.
The ability to store and recall all parameters in Live efficiently and fast by using program change# from clips.
Sure, you can do this with most VST's within Live, and you can do this with M4L, or ClyphX.
Yet all of the current ways are slow and have unpredictable results.
While something like Kapture seems the best idea, it is very slow.
Using personal M4L devices I can store/recall just the params I assign (not EVERYTHING), it lightens the load, but it's still slow, and has unpredictable results at times along with CPU spikes in large sets.
ClyphX is slow too, and more tedious than it's worth for storing and recalling.

I would like to see a better solution, which might be an SSD drive, havent tried that yet.

barstu
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by barstu » Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:59 pm

I'm using a custom M4L device with a pattr object to select an instrument rack chain and recall each of the 8 nob settings. I am on an SSD and it is a bit spikey. It may be to do with me turning devices on and off though with each patch change.

I'm hoping this kind of thing is addressed in 9, bring it back to more of a practical live performance tool. I think some sort of advanced clip follow menu where you can do all sorts of API stuff when a clip is fired, is what's needed.

turrican
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by turrican » Fri Jun 08, 2012 3:22 pm

yeah first of all I agree the midi protocol outdated and using the API is the way to go. Unfortunatly most of the external device still communicate via midi. If mididevices should be supported there's always the trade off if/how the midi scope is translated to much higher resolutions. If one wants to use M4L in context of Live's API, at leat for me, writing JS is horrible because you have no import statements. Writing larger Programs without having f.i. constants or classes for simple tasks like serialization in a sepperate file drives me crazy. The advantage is among others to provide a GUI and of course access to Cycling's libs. The disadvantage is that for unrestricted midi communication (in case one wants o use a midi controller etc.) has to be set up in python firsthand. Option 2 would be to take just Python.
I liked the integration very much, but you can't provide a GUI and you highly depend on the _Framework-classes. The program will break if they change and one has to hope to get the new ones decompiled.
Yet all of the current ways are slow and have unpredictable results.
I agree. But it depends one what you want to do. You sound more like looking a way for storing recalling parameter vals in a standardized way.
While something like Kapture seems the best idea, it is very slow.
True and once when I read the JS source of it I thought how confusing it would be to write even more lines in the poor file. I'd join M4L if they would provide API access with Java.
ClyphX is slow too, and more tedious than it's worth for storing and recalling.
I agree again. But I need to take some time and read Stray's sources. It might be that way because it needs to be thinned out. But I would really need some serious time off for this - his python level is not too bad :) . That BTW was more less my moving cause to stick with java and midi.. But hey that's cool. We could discuss some data structure / general implementation of mappings and parameters on the API side? I always thought of how could it would be to develop a DSL wich produces all of this.

turrican
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Re: anybody wants a free midi looper ?

Post by turrican » Fri Jun 08, 2012 3:34 pm

I'm using a custom M4L device with a pattr object to select an instrument rack chain and recall each of the 8 nob settings. I am on an SSD and it is a bit spikey. It may be to do with me turning devices on and off though with each patch change
This is an instance where I prefer to catch the states elsewhere (sadly as midi)- where I can manage my own preset system - and 'updata' live with that data and take the remote midi events out to update the extenal controllers. Buts thats not cool either.

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