Live 9 mackie control

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
fishmonkey
Posts: 4478
Joined: Wed Oct 24, 2007 4:50 am

Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by fishmonkey » Mon Mar 31, 2014 11:26 am

TomViolenz wrote:
fishmonkey wrote:no worries, i love how well Live supports the Mackie Control...
?

Wasn't this thread running over several months without a word from Ableton kinda proof that it doesn't really?!

Very poor showing IMO
And I don't even use mackie control...
no, i think you are off the mark.

Live has had really good Mackie Control support for years. the Live 6 & 7 manuals even have sections dedicated to the Mackie Control (it got ditched from the Live 8 manual and replaced with an APC40 section).

the main problem is that the Mackie Control protocol is proprietary, and whilst many other controllers claim to support the MC protocol, most are half-assed reverse engineering jobs...


fishmonkey
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by fishmonkey » Mon Mar 31, 2014 1:46 pm

give me a break, you were born to argue.

the main issue with the MC XT handling was fixed in a beta less than two weeks after the thread was started.

and as i said, most of the other issues are not really Ableton's problem, they exist because very few MIDI controllers properly implement the Mackie Control protocol, which is not a straightforward MIDI CC/Note protocol.

the whole reason i bought a real Mackie Control Universal Pro a few years ago is because i got sick of screwing around with half-baked Mackie Control emulations.


fishmonkey
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by fishmonkey » Mon Mar 31, 2014 2:01 pm

it's all good.

happily your comments prompted me to go and check the state of Mackie Control handling in Studio One, which used to be terrible.

it seems that recently they have added really good support, so maybe now i will start using it as my linear DAW...

nightscope
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by nightscope » Mon Mar 31, 2014 3:20 pm

[sih] wrote:We'll take another look here, what OS version are you on and which of the Mackie devices are you using?
Simon, I'm on Windows XP Sp3. I've one of the latest Mackie Universal Pro's running v.4.0.3 firmware.

Cheers.


shadiradio
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Location: Los Angeles, CA
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by shadiradio » Mon Mar 31, 2014 7:06 pm

I was super confused about the Mackie Control issues, for too long. I also decompiled the scripts, found a fix (for one issue), and reported to them the line number and code change, and still waited for a proper fix. Other users did the same. I don't know what the deal was, but it seems to work out of the box in Bitwig - no display corruption, proper meter displays, etc. :(

fishmonkey
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by fishmonkey » Mon Mar 31, 2014 10:18 pm

nightscope wrote:I've one of the latest Mackie Universal Pro's running v.4.0.3 firmware.
oh yeah, i'm using one of the older MCU Pros with 3.0.0 firmware...

nightscope
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by nightscope » Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:39 am

fishmonkey wrote:oh yeah, i'm using one of the older MCU Pros with 3.0.0 firmware...
So your display is OK on a mac with v3. Maybe a USB thing over here. I'm on 9.1.1.

fishmonkey
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by fishmonkey » Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:46 am

nightscope wrote: So your display is OK on a mac with v3. Maybe a USB thing over here. I'm on 9.1.1.
my MCU Pro has MIDI and USB-MIDI, and i'm using the latter. it's not the old old model, it has the light coloured case but it was built before they changed the faders to belt-drive ALPS ones...

nightscope
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by nightscope » Tue Apr 01, 2014 3:08 am

fishmonkey wrote:my MCU Pro has MIDI and USB-MIDI, and i'm using the latter. it's not the old old model, it has the light coloured case but it was built before they changed the faders to belt-drive ALPS ones...
OK. Battle on.

jestermgee
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Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by jestermgee » Tue Apr 01, 2014 3:37 am

TomViolenz wrote:I don't want to argue here, and I don't know how difficult it was to reverse engineer Mackie control in the beginning.
But this thread is over a year old.
A solution came from a user 4 days later. A solution for which he had to technically brake Abletons EULA (decompiling Lives .pyc scripts).
He was also not reverse engineering Mackie, he needed to reverse engineer Abletons work.

Now the first response from an Ableton employee comes 4! days ago, more than a year after the problem was solved by one of their users, and you think this was great work?!

I repeat: poor showing!
Firstly Tom, if you don't even own an MCU what are you even in here for stirring shit again? You haven't a clue of "how well an MCU works" with Live without actually owning one. Troll off somewhere else.

The "issues" were simple small glitches in some of the code and though a user did solve the problem Ableton have actually addressed the main issue of the channel strips not displaying data for any channel playing audio. the other small issues are not even important.

I have used a number of MCU emulated devices including a BCF1000 and an Alphatrack and both of these and my actual MCU have all worked perfectly over the last 4. With a few of us having the same issue and one user posting actual photo proof of the issue, the fixed scripts in this thread and some nice words to Ableton they addressed the issue for us which had nothing to do with the actual functionality of the MCU rather a simple glitch. Some users probably never even noticed.

I can certainly confirm if just for Abletons own knowledge that the main issue that I reported which was the ....... replacing a device parameter on a track playing audio is now fixed in the betas though this is something that is better discussed in the Beta forum but I felt as an ACTUAL user I should correct the misconceptions.

:roll:


[smc]
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Joined: Wed Jul 31, 2013 2:24 pm

Re: Live 9 mackie control

Post by [smc] » Tue Apr 01, 2014 4:15 pm

Hey, Scott from Ableton here. I've uploaded another version of the scripts to try out. This still mostly only addresses the metering bug, but "hopefully" this fixes nightscope's issue. If it doesn't address the issue please let me know.

Additionally, on the MCU Pro, pressing the Pan mode button multiple times, or enabling the level meters from the IO, Send, or Effect modes would also show a blank "...." display instead of each mode's values. This should also hopefully be resolved, but please let me know if it isn't or you're running into any other strange behaviour.

Please follow Simon's instructions from below. Your .zip folder should have a "v2" at the end. Thanks again for trying this out!
[sih] wrote: Please find the latest script here:

https://downloads.ableton.com/support/M ... Fix_v2.zip

Installation instructions:

Step 1.

Download and unzip the file. It will unzip into the following 3 folders: MackieControl, MackieControl_Classic & MackieControlXT

Leave this folder structure as is!

Step 2.

Navigate to the folder “MIDI Remote Scripts”. You'll find this here:

Windows:

C:\ProgramData\Ableton\Live x\Resources\MIDI Remote Scripts\ on Windows 7 and Vista and C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Ableton\Live x\Resources\MIDI Remote Scripts\ on Windows XP.

Mac:

Locate the “Live.app” file here: Macintosh HD/Applications/Live x.x.x./Live.app
Right click on the “Live.app” file and choose “Show Package Contents”
Open the folder: Contents/App-Resources/MIDI Remote Scripts/

Please refer to the following knowledge base article for further information on how to access hidden folders on Windows and Mac OS X.

Step 3.

With Live closed, move the folders you extracted in Step 1 to the MIDI Remote Scripts folder, replacing the existing Mackie folders (you can back them up first to be safe if you like).

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