Am I the *ONLY* one finding M4L actually honestly unusable!?
Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2018 6:26 pm
Live itself is missing a **TON** of features that M4L helps fill in for like LFO knob controllers, patterned knob controllers, better arpeggiators, great instruments, etc, but i find that more often than not right now, it's actually unusable because these tools stop working over time!
Here's some examples.
1 : MONO SEQUENCER : i load that up and it works fine for about a minute or so and then becomes graphically unresponsive. where it only redraws the gui if you click on the screen which makes it basically unusable.
2 : i'm a scripter myself and i created a tool to send/receive data between tracks (and they use unique IDs to know whom to talk to). i found that after i had about two or three of these instances loaded, i couldn't load anymore because they'd be magically breaking each other's send/receive communications.
3 : i have another script that's insanely basic. all it does is let me push a hotkey and it will push the record button on the first empty clip of the armed track. very basic and i use it all the time. but the problem is that after i've been working in a song for many days (with countless saves, ableton loads/closes, machine sleeps/wakes/reboots, etc), the hotkey will stop working (in that specific song). I looked into what's breaking it and for some magical reason, the ONE button my gui has is not even hotkey-bindable anymore! if you go into the hotkey binding mode, the button will not be colored to show that it's bindable. And what breaks this? Just having a song that i've been working on for weeks. nothing else. Deleting it and reloading it will not fix it. And i have nothing else regarding M4L in the scene, so no other M4L devices are magically breaking it like i was finding with my send/receive scripts. I seem to remember trying a couple of tests with this specific breakage case and found that my button did still work. it's just that it wasn't hotkeyable. and if i pressed the EDIT M4L SCRIPT button, M4L would crash when opening the script. So a very basic script is completely tearing M4L apart from the inside, only because the song is now very long and complex and has a TON of devices, clips, scenes, etc etc etc.... That's the level of insanity I'm dealing with.
4 : i had another script i was using (can't remember which one) that would work fine on small songs, but on a large song that's been in production for a week, it would eventually break to the point that if you load the song and press play, the script will work for that first playthrough and never again on any other times you hit the play button. and my song was 100% dependent on that script, so it was a real hassle to work on that song. That problem didn't start until i was at about the 75% level of completion on that song, so it worked for many many days and then could no longer work properly for an unknown reason. nothing changed except the song was older and had more content.
So basically, i've had to just stop using M4L because i can't trust it to work. I tried deleting my preferences (and default scene) to see if that would help at all, but nope.
I'm a *HEAVY* scripter for other programs and there's COUNTLESS features ableton is blatantly missing that i'd love to just create by myself, but i've found that M4L's got two lethal problems. 1)it's only exposed to less than half of the ableton application in the API when it needs to be ALL. 2)in my experience, it breaks nonstop and it's not the scripter's fault. So in the end that means it's unusable in actual production. I've also been using M4L for years and it's had this same level of breakage, so it's not a new problem.
So I guess what i'm curious about is am I the only person that's magically running into these problems? Or is everyone, and that M4L really only works when you have brand new basic songs and thus isn't usable in full production?!
Here's some examples.
1 : MONO SEQUENCER : i load that up and it works fine for about a minute or so and then becomes graphically unresponsive. where it only redraws the gui if you click on the screen which makes it basically unusable.
2 : i'm a scripter myself and i created a tool to send/receive data between tracks (and they use unique IDs to know whom to talk to). i found that after i had about two or three of these instances loaded, i couldn't load anymore because they'd be magically breaking each other's send/receive communications.
3 : i have another script that's insanely basic. all it does is let me push a hotkey and it will push the record button on the first empty clip of the armed track. very basic and i use it all the time. but the problem is that after i've been working in a song for many days (with countless saves, ableton loads/closes, machine sleeps/wakes/reboots, etc), the hotkey will stop working (in that specific song). I looked into what's breaking it and for some magical reason, the ONE button my gui has is not even hotkey-bindable anymore! if you go into the hotkey binding mode, the button will not be colored to show that it's bindable. And what breaks this? Just having a song that i've been working on for weeks. nothing else. Deleting it and reloading it will not fix it. And i have nothing else regarding M4L in the scene, so no other M4L devices are magically breaking it like i was finding with my send/receive scripts. I seem to remember trying a couple of tests with this specific breakage case and found that my button did still work. it's just that it wasn't hotkeyable. and if i pressed the EDIT M4L SCRIPT button, M4L would crash when opening the script. So a very basic script is completely tearing M4L apart from the inside, only because the song is now very long and complex and has a TON of devices, clips, scenes, etc etc etc.... That's the level of insanity I'm dealing with.
4 : i had another script i was using (can't remember which one) that would work fine on small songs, but on a large song that's been in production for a week, it would eventually break to the point that if you load the song and press play, the script will work for that first playthrough and never again on any other times you hit the play button. and my song was 100% dependent on that script, so it was a real hassle to work on that song. That problem didn't start until i was at about the 75% level of completion on that song, so it worked for many many days and then could no longer work properly for an unknown reason. nothing changed except the song was older and had more content.
So basically, i've had to just stop using M4L because i can't trust it to work. I tried deleting my preferences (and default scene) to see if that would help at all, but nope.
I'm a *HEAVY* scripter for other programs and there's COUNTLESS features ableton is blatantly missing that i'd love to just create by myself, but i've found that M4L's got two lethal problems. 1)it's only exposed to less than half of the ableton application in the API when it needs to be ALL. 2)in my experience, it breaks nonstop and it's not the scripter's fault. So in the end that means it's unusable in actual production. I've also been using M4L for years and it's had this same level of breakage, so it's not a new problem.
So I guess what i'm curious about is am I the only person that's magically running into these problems? Or is everyone, and that M4L really only works when you have brand new basic songs and thus isn't usable in full production?!
