Support for Polyphonic Aftertouch

[AFranke]

+1

[ChironControl]

I would also love poly aftertouch. My Launchpad Pro supports it and it would give so many more possibilities in expression!

[przemuh]

I have Roland TD-1KV Drumset and I cannot choke my cybals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utyqoX1Bf_4

When I was recording this movie I did not know that this is related with Polyphonic Aftertouch

+1 for Polyphonic Aftertouch idea ... please only pass the messages into MIDI track ! Don't remove them

[groumpf]

@przemuh

Hi, that's the point.
I made a test with my VFX and MIDI-OX and it displays (depending of the VFX patch) Channel aftertouch (all notes are affected the same way) and Key aftertouch (different effect for each note).

So your case is Key aftertouch which is rejected by Ableton Live.
You can't do anything even with Max which is limited the same way by Live.

[xer4111]

The CME Xkey series of keyboards also support poly aftertouch:

http://www.cme-pro.com/

I demoed these at the 2015 NAMM show and they are really smooth to play, very portable and you slide your fingers up and down the keys to execute poly AT, the same way the keyboards in Garage Band work.

These are VERY affordable and allow really musical performance of complex timbre effects using Poly AT, just like you can get with Animoog and many other IOS-based instruments.

Except that you can't do any of that in Ableton LIVE, because these messages are blocked.

So I think it's about time the developers get the message and at least allow direct pass-through of poly AT messages so that people can use LIVE as the host for doing live performance using controllers that support poly AT and have the many soft-instruments that support it be able to respond to it.

As examples, several Arturia instruments (including the Modular V, SEM, SC80 and others), NI Reaktor and others can use Poly AT to great effect.

I'm currently able to use these in Mainstage with Ableton Live loaded as Rewire slave, and I can perform with all my favorite instrument setups that support poly AT. It's a real pain to have to use Live that way since I have to use only the native Live setups (no Max either) when using Live as Rewire, but it does allow me to perform with Poly AT.

So again, this is another plea for the developers to really push this up in priority. It simply can't be that much trouble to allow pass-through. It would be great to be able to record the Poly AT as well, even if you can't edit the messages, because then you could at least capture a performance without having to go straight to audio recording.

But I think a lot of Ableton users would be very happy to simply have the pass-through so that loaded instruments would be able to respond to poly AT in a performance setting.

Okay - all for now.

Rex Perry

[hyperscientist]

Seaboard RISE owner here, disappointed one. I had to buy Bitwig to let me record and edit it in a sane way - it's slowly growing on me, but after investing so much time in Live - I would prefer to not have to do that.

[parking sun]

The CME Xkey series of keyboards also support poly aftertouch:
So I think it's about time the developers get the message and at least allow direct pass-through of poly AT messages so that people can use LIVE as the host for doing live performance using controllers that support poly AT and have the many soft-instruments that support it be able to respond to it.

+1. I really wish Live did not so aggressively delete MIDI data, stripping multi-channel data and poly aftertouch from your input data. I don't care that live doesn't have a GUI that would make sense for editing such data, I just want the data to survive.

[jinzae]

I +1 this idea, I have to record clips via the session button up top which lets all the armed tracks record a clip at once, then resample this into an audio track before being able to use a performance in a track.
Channel per note is greatly needed in live. May have to jump ships to Bitwig otherwise.

[xer4111]

Saw several newer midi controllers at NAMM - POLY PRESSURE is here to stay and is getting more and more widely supported, especially including the LaunchPad Pro, which has really cool implementation.

There is a "critical mass" going on here. Ableton, please hear your users on this one - POLY Pressure is a hot item, and Live needs to at least support a pass through to instruments. I can verify that the midi information hits Live in the Midi In indicator upper right of the screen, and I can see that it is blocked from getting into Live past that point.

I'm sure the developers have their concerns about the volume of message data passing through Live if the filter is taken off, but if you're worried about users complaining about performance in some areas, then just have it be a preference that is "off" by default, which users can turn on and live with any performance hit that might occur.

Please implement this. This thread is old and has a lot of interest. Your competitor supports it and is gaining market share. A few years ago there were only a couple of esoteric and very expensive midi controllers that supported it, but now there are many and they include VERY inexpensive ones, and controllers specifically designed for Live, so it's time to face the music on this.

Thanks!

Rex Perry

[ChironControl]

Well said!

[xer4111]

Still holding out for Ableton to allow pass-through of polypressure. I use Ableton now daily as a performance rig for my polyAT supporting keyboard, which I CANNOT use to it's full potential with a large number of my software synths because Live filters out the Po;y AT data.

C'mon Ableton. This is becoming a very sore issue - it's your user base talking here. Your future income (or loss of it).

I don't want to have to work out another solution for my rig - Live does a great job and is very stable. I cannot imagine that allowing pass-through of Poly pressure is going to compromise that, but I'm just seeing more and more hardware supporting it and so many soft synths supporting it....

This is just a bit frustrating....

Any others?

Rex

[xer4111]

Still looking to see if any other users want to jump in to support this feature request - it's seen a lot of views over the last couple of years and is being tiresomely ignored by the developers, which is really strange to me since there are now at least a half dozen synths or midi controllers that are in affordable price ranges that support poly pressure (polyphonic aftertouch), and unless I'm terribly mistaken, the only reason the developers of Live would choose to filter out this midi information from passing through to instruments would be the idea that it's a large volume of midi data in a stream. However, midi data is tiny compared to audio data, so it's just unreal to me that this would be such a big issue.

Now, I'm not currently suggesting ability to record or edit poly pressure messages, just to allow the filter to come off so that the information can be recognized by software instruments, or be passed through back to external instruments that support this.

I am a keyboardist who uses Live to create a set of performance settings. And I have a controller that would allow me the full advantage of at least six different software synths to play live with poly pressure - this would be the same way I can currently use Apple Mainstage.

Is everyone out there a DJ who just uses Live to trigger loops? Maybe that's why the developers don't give this the importance I feel it should have.

Anyone?

Best,

Rex Perry
Perry Multimedia Inc
Ableton user since version 2

[parking sun]

I doubt the developers spend time reading the forums trawling for feature requests, of which there are many thousands; that way lies madness.

Probably the way to get developer attention is to report the aftertouch-deletion as a bug to the support email address, which we know the developers do check; I imagine this would be annoying for every feature request, but I imagine interfering unexpectedly with MIDI counts as a bug, or at least a lot people seem to think so, so presumably this would be legitimate?
Anyone want to try a bug report and let us know what the news is? AFAICT the more people report a bug, the faster it gets fixed.

In the mean-time, I use jack-router to pump Reaktor, MaxMSP etc in standalone mode to pump audio into Live, and control them directly from the hardware. The Live is basically a sample-player and final-state mixer. It's like Rewire on steroids.

It's tedious to set up, especially for effects that need both input and output, but certainly less tedious than waiting for the feature to arrive in Live. As a plus, you can use any alternative DAW as your final stage mixer - replace Live with Bitwig, Logic etc (Haven't tried it on Windows, but I imagine Acid etc would work the same) so you also get some added flexibility. For that matter, you could probably route, e.g. Bitwig into Live into Logic that way, but I don't have the spare CPU cycles for that.

[Tarekith]

The main purpose of the feature wish list forum is so we can see what features users are interested in. It definitely is read regularly by the developers.

[xer4111]

Thanks Erik,

I appreciate your assurances regarding this. I'm being a "squeaky wheel" because I figure it might influence priority in regard to this particular feature request, and also to remind Ableton that other alternatives exist out there and that competition can be a bitch.

However, I also want to emphasize that I have chosen Live as my performance DAW of choice because it has better stability and CPU efficiency than Mainstage, (which DOES support Poly Pressure perfectly) and because I can do so much more to create a vast panorama of electronic music in a live performance setting. So it's a workable trade-off to sacrifice Poly Pressure in comparison to all the other useful features. Even though Midi-routing is a bit primative, it still works well and I'm able to use Touchable for iPad to run the program remotely.

It would be a GREAT bonus to have poly pressure pass-through to soft-instruments. Since I'm playing with both hands and both feet on controllers, being able to sweep a single note or trigger other modulations on a per-note basis would be extremely valuable.

So, I just want to keep this request alive. I know there are many other very cool looking feature requests that compete for the developers attention. This one would help a lot of users, and I think it deserves enough priority to be brought to the top of the list.

I would gladly sign on as a beta-tester to work with the devs on any issues relating to implementing this - just let me know if that would be helpful.

Live is a great product and I have a lot of my time invested in learning how to use it. So switching to another DAW Because of this one feature seems a poor choice. Not a threat here - it's a practical reality.

Okay, thanks for the attention given to this post!

Rex