Ableton Forum

Has anybody tried this ? Does it offer any major advantages over normal input methods?

I do, mostly in mixing phase. It may be helpful to distinguish between 'touch' and 'multi-touch' (MT).

Only some DAWs (I believe Sonar and Studio One have the most thorough implementations) have been written to take advantage of MT. And even though the DAW may have been written to respond some VST/VSTi products may not support it even though the DAW itself does.

Reviews are mixed but in my circumstance I find it quite helpful although it does take a bit of fiddling to get used to the lack of tactile feedback. In my case I'm running Windows so I use a laptop with a 15" screen in Remote Desktop mode. Because I have a need for a DAW and a less powerful laptop it made economic sense to go about it this way instead of buying a control surface...so I saved a bit coin there.

Personally I think MT is the future as the APIs get more fully developed and developers start taking advantage of that.

YMMV

I`ve paid close attention to the potential of touchscreen technology since it was introduced a few years back and was hyped about it quite a long time. But there are some problems with it:

1. Working with faders often works fine. But the knobs, clips, etc. can be quite fiddly. In both cases you need a big monitor though.
2. If you have a big monitor, your arms tire after a not too long time. So it isn`t an input source which is practical for longer sessions.
3. Since nothing has been done by the DAW developers to improve the UI to make point 1 work better in the last 4 years, I guess that is mainly because of point 2.

Touchscreen works sublime with laptops. But with desktop usage it`s just not quite working out. That is also the reason why there are so few 27 inch touch screens on the market.

If you want to use touchscreens as an input source I suggest that you buy an iPad and use the touchable2 app. It compliments ableton in a nice way and you can draw in automation, etc. using your fingers.

Even a laptop is kinda tricky. The best way I've found for holding one is on my lap, almost as close as possible, as if it were a tablet.

The tablet format is most ideal, it does not have a keyboard jutting from it to interfere. The other ideal is a tabletop manner, but it'd be best if it were level with the standard table height, and slightly angled. Not a thick device elevated above table height, and completely level.

As for progress, you generally want to zoom your software or OS

A few daws are getting more touch friendly. I think Sonar kinda got their feet wet first. Right now we have Studio One and FL Studio having touch implementation growing inside of them. And Bitwig is making a pretty huge dive into touch in the near future, along with tackling some of the problems associated with it (by offering touch-modes instead of just giving their current mouse-inspired layout touch)

Studio One v3's implementation is pretty good IMO, until you get to navigating and editing in the arrange view it looked like.

FL Studio Supports MT extensively.

I've tried Live 9 Suite and Studio One on an Asus T100-TA convertible notebook/tablet and they both work better in notebook mode than in tablet mode. Some things work with touch, others don't. Ideally, I'd be able to afford a Microsoft Surface 3, but there are touch problems even with this tablet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNkNEFlUtEk

useful info, thanks for replies folks.

This may be of interest to some on this thread. Molten Music has a video series where he shares his experience with DAWs on a Surface Pro. Here's his installment for Live:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPLUivPDK0Q


The bit he covers about absolute mouse mode beginning around 7:30 might be of interest to some.

I've been using the ipad extensively in the last couple of years. That ecosystem is still many years behind computer DAWS. So the idea using Ableton Live as a big 'ol app on a touch screen is intriguing to me.

What if I do not want to use an I-pad, Android tablet while using an app like Lemur or Touchable but run it all on windows (or osx if you like)?

Recently I was thinking about the possibilities of using a touch screen monitor as a second monitor and use it as a midi controller like Lemur (in windows)
Therefore you would need a windows program (something similar like Lemur) and run this together with Ableton on your OS.
I think in this way it would be possible to create lots of different midi-controllers in this program the way you would like it.

I am a Noob on this. Are there some examples or users who already apply this sort of midi-control ?

https://smithsonmartin.com/products/emulator-pro/

There is that, but I've never seen enough user feedback, videos, templates to really justify investing in it.

Yes, thanks, something like that. I wonder if it works on a second monitor and it looks a bit toy-ish though.

But now I am thinking....
If possible ??
A M4L device would be great for a touch screen midi controller. It would be nice to have some floating screens on your second monitor, put some faders and knobs in it, some banks, a nice GUI and touch and use them as a midi controller. Maybe some fancy mapping.
No extra software needed, no extra costs (hopefully), runs together with ableton. Sounds great to me !

Edit; Putting the above in feature Wishlist

This is where Windows kinda gets in the way. Although you can have touch apps, things which are not natively touch have weird quirks about how they operate.

Tom Cosm made a keyboard in m4l intended for touch, but it is useless because of both how max and windows handle touch.

Max does not have anything that says 'this button is for touch, it ought to behave in this manner'. Because of that, the buttons act in the way that windows and mouse use defaults to.

This behavior is, often times single touch, but also when you press a button or key, it is not triggered until Release. This is also how a mouse works. You press the button, you might 'hold' and drag things, but to Trigger or Press something it waits until you release the button.

I also had to turn off in windows the 'context menu on long-press' option because you don't want that popping up while you wait for the right moment to click something, essentially taking away the option to click it.

So until touch is actually taken into consideration, you'll had to rely on overlays like the above mentioned software. It does look kinda toyish, but that is sort of what's required in order to make something intuitive for touch use.

There is also a pretty badass video of Bitwig in use with multitouch. They have some really good ideas.
http://youtu.be/ZoBSP5Pnmps