Rise Rainbow Push...Rise!

[jameth]

In actual use, the color doesn't bother me a huge amount, but when I see videos of a a push that the white is actually white, I do get annoyed big time.

I can't really see why they wouldn't be able to give us the ability to do custom white balancing, somewhere inside the push is some code telling it how to display white and the various other colors, that code has got to be accessible some how or another.

I bet we will see a "PUSH Color Correction" tool from Ableton that will allow us to fine tune our own equipment.


This is such a simple problem, with what should be a simple solution...

the logic of how to do it is pretty simple. doing it fast enough on the fly is the big problem. i think we can assume that currently the electronics in the Push use a single definition for each colour, which is global for all 64 pads. to have individual colours means processing each pad individually, for every refresh cycle of the pads. so it needs to happen really fast.

if the solution was simple they would have done it months ago.

First of all I don't know about Ableton doing anything in what most companies would consider a reasonable time frame, so as far as it being done months ago if it was simple, well I don't buy it. (Wasn't PUSH supposed to be "released" back in like May?)

With regards to your hypothesis on how the colors are defined, that could certainly be accurate, and if that was the case then I would say a more efficient and effective way to do it would be to have LIVE send color hex values per pad, instead of just calling a specific pre defined color in which the PUSH itself decides the color values. In this scenario, LIVE would actually be in control of the actual color being outputted, not simply telling the push "show white", but, "show this color I have defined as white for you"


Anyways this is all hypothesis and conjecture, getting away from the hypothetical, even if they allowed us a way to simply adjust the values for each color globally, some of us with minor discoloration could probably improve the looks of our units, even if not completely.


I guess you can manually hack the skin cfg file, but that is a hack job, ableton could at least give us an official way to do it.

Also even this way does not allow us to CHANGE the actual color values outside of the pre-defined color names.

[jameth]

As an additional note, it seems interesting to me that all the official, and non-official, early videos (mostly done before PUSH's were in regular peoples hands), with various different PUSH's, they all seem quite consistent and well balanced.



So the way I see it there are a few possible explanations;

1. Early units had a different LED vendor/manufacturer/something that changed in the end product from the early revisions.

2. Early units that went out to various review entities and professionals in the industry had the exact same components, but were hand checked and "cherry picked" for quality and consistency by Ableton before going out.

3. Early units that went out to various review entities and professionals in the industry had the exact same components, but were manually color balanced and fixed in house by Ableton, before going out.




So if it's #1, then Ableton has a legitimate "oops", and needs to fix the problem and give us an appropriate return window to get our units fixed or replaced.

If it's #2, then Ableton knew about the issue, attempted to cover it up for reviewers, and delivered a product to regular consumers they knew was not up to the spec that they sent out to reviewers and industry folk, a big NO NO. In this scenario they should also fix the problem and give us an appropriate window of replacement.

If it's #3, then just own up to it and give us the tool/ability to fix our units.



I can't imagine any other possible explanations for the picture perfect pushes all over the internet, before they were actually all that available to the end consumers.

Can you?


If scenario 3 is correct, why don't they just give us the tool/ability to fix it ourselves and make all this go away, you ask?




My guess is, if they do have a tool or a way to tweak colors per pads on the push, it is probably a development tool they use in house, and they don't want to expose that level of access of the PUSH firmware to us.



This seems to be a logical possibility (maybe even a probability) to me.

[login]

If it's #2, then Ableton knew about the issue, attempted to cover it up for reviewers, and delivered a product they knew was not up to the spec they sent out to reviewers and industry folk, a big NO NO. In this scenario they should also fix the problem and give us an appropriate window of replacement.

If you had followed the info around here you would knew that in fact Ableton Knew this and they considered it a minor issue which doesnt affect usability. If you pay attention to many videos the issue is visible (even those in the ableton website), but as has been showed in many photos it's more evident in dark light than in a film.

the rest you write is just not logical at all, they don't have a tool, the functionality of PUSH is written in Live's code and I think that by now if anything , as changing colours, was there it would have been already beeen exposed by the two or three very good developers outthere working with push scripts.

The problems is the hardware and it comes form the getting 64 pads, each one with 3 rgb leds being matched perfectly.

But I don't doubt they are currently developing a tool to recalibrate at home, as they stated previoously they are "orking on a solution".

[Disfigurine]

I have just received word from Ableton that they are developing manual calibration software so that the user can calibrate the LEDs themselves. No projection of a release date yet.

[jameth]

If it's #2, then Ableton knew about the issue, attempted to cover it up for reviewers, and delivered a product they knew was not up to the spec they sent out to reviewers and industry folk, a big NO NO. In this scenario they should also fix the problem and give us an appropriate window of replacement.

If you had followed the info around here you would knew that in fact Ableton Knew this and they considered it a minor issue which doesnt affect usability. If you pay attention to many videos the issue is visible (even those in the ableton website), but as has been showed in many photos it's more evident in dark light than in a film.

the rest you write is just not logical at all, they don't have a tool, the functionality of PUSH is written in Live's code and I think that by now if anything , as changing colours, was there it would have been already beeen exposed by the two or three very good developers outthere working with push scripts.

The problems is the hardware and it comes form the getting 64 pads, each one with 3 rgb leds being matched perfectly.

But I don't doubt they are currently developing a tool to recalibrate at home, as they stated previoously they are "orking on a solution".

I have followed the info on this, and I know about their statement, and I have seen EXTREMELY slight discolorations on the the early videos, but NOTHING like what actual people are getting delivered to them.

The rest of what I said is in-fact completely logical, and indeed is being proven / will be proven, when they release a tool to tweak the INTERNAL FIRMWARE THAT NONE OF US HAVE ACCESS TO, good developers or not, you cannot fix what is literally not accessible to you.

Read post above this for further evidence this is a fixable FIRMWARE issue that they simply need to give us access to...


I am guessing you didn't even read my post and just picked out a part of it you wanted to attack, as I never once presented any of my POSSIBILITIES as known facts, simply as logical possibilities to an issue that we don't have all the information on.


BTW you are out of your mind if you think the PUSH is completely governed by the scripts that they give us access too, there is firmware inside the push that we simply don't get to play with, period.

The color you see displayed by the LED's is a function of the amount of amperage running through each individual cathode/anode of the red, green and blue. (Actually its PWM that is emulating variances in amperage to the LED over time in miliseconds, if you want to get technical.)

The reason calibration is needed, is because every LED manufactured has variances, one might be a little brighter then another in the same batch, with the same amperage. That doesn't mean you have to HADN PICK and TEST every single LED to get a balanced end product, you simply calibrate and adjust your end product to achieve a balance.


This is ALL defined IN FIRMWARE ON THE DEVICE, the push is not just a bunch of switches and buttons that is totally and completely controlled by LIVE, even though they make it look that way.

They simply assumed a default calibration would be adequate enough for mass production, and probably would rather not give us anything that taps into the Firmware if they don't have to (just wait till people start hacking into the actual PUSH firmware, which is what Ableton really does not want to happen).

Well it wasn't adequate enough, and now they are giving us a tool to fix it whether they originally wanted to or not, simple as that.





It is pretty clear that using their internal development stuff, they are able to calibrate the LEDS properly, adn this is NOT something that is truly HARD CODED into the push, otherwise they wouldn't tell people that a software calibration tool is going to be released to fix these problems.

They clearly made sure the early units that weren't part of the mass production, were very well calibrated, and the mass produced stuff, was not calibrated per device.

[jameth]

Anyhow, forum trolls aside, I am super glad to see my original hypothesis is most likely correct, this is in-fact a firmware issue that can be resolved by Ableton releasing a software tool that taps into the firmware, and allows hardware/firmware level calibration.

As any good software/hardware engineer knows, if a device is doing RGB color mixing with LED's, this is pretty much required to be consistent and accurate from led to led, and device to device.

Wahoo!

I have just received word from Ableton that they are developing manual calibration software so that the user can calibrate the LEDs themselves. No projection of a release date yet.

[Tarekith]

I think I win for worst Push, my blue's aren't even the same.

[deva]

I think I win for worst Push, my blue's aren't even the same.

Neither are mine... but yours looks marginally worse!

[fishmonkey]

With regards to your hypothesis on how the colors are defined, that could certainly be accurate, and if that was the case then I would say a more efficient and effective way to do it would be to have LIVE send color hex values per pad, instead of just calling a specific pre defined color in which the PUSH itself decides the color values. In this scenario, LIVE would actually be in control of the actual color being outputted, not simply telling the push "show white", but, "show this color I have defined as white for you"

nope, i don't think looking up and sending calibrated colours from the Python remote script will work, simply because it takes too much time, and it needs to happen super fast. and if it was as easy as that there is no reason why the Abe's wouldn't have implemented it that way already.

i'm sure they are working really hard to try and find a workable solution, hopefully they crack it. one way might be to use an optimised algorithm where most of the pads work they way they do now, and only a subset of the pads that really need calibration are individually colour-mapped.

[Disfigurine]

Here's the official word from ableton regarding the calibration software.

"Thanks for getting back to us.

Regarding your Push LED variance issues, we can offer you the following two options:

1) Hold on to the unit for the time being while we find a solution to this issue. Our technical team are currently looking into a way for users to calibrate the LED colours on their Push themselves. However this is still in development so we cannot say when this will be available, probably within the next couple of months.

2) The other option would be to go back to the store you purchased Push from and kindly ask if they will swap the unit again, or simply return it and get a refund.

We'll be sure to get in touch as soon as our developers have perfected the fix for this issue. In the meantime, we really appreciate your patience and understanding in this matter until it has been resolved. "

[Tarekith]

Good to know. For now I'm digging the Seapunk version, looks a lot better using that.

[sixbysix]

Good to hear. I’ll re-order then.

[thronechild]

Glad to hear we are getting somewhere, I'm still gonn try to exchange though, a couple months is a long time.

Maybe they will go one step further and allow official custom colors. Don't expect it but would be cool.

[jameth]

As much as I would like to just copy the email from their support that I got this morning on the issue, it specifically says not to I guess...

But the bottom line is this statement;


"What I can tell you is that we are investigating a combined firmware/software fix. "



This is great news!

Ableton would seriously benefit from being a little more open and transparent with these things, if they had a blog post or something talking about this, and saying just what they are telling people privately in support tickets, everyone would be a whole lot more satisfied with their purchases, or potential purchases, and there would be a whole lot less people raising hell.

[bkg2018]

Good to know. For now I'm digging the Seapunk version, looks a lot better using that.

Same for me. First time I had my Push ON I was a little disappointed at white buttons not showing the same white and some being slightly magenta ... To be honnest, after playing a little I didn't even care about it.

Now I have the Seapush theme and I totally forgot the issue. Push is such a damn great thing!

Feel sorry for those who have a rainbow one. Hope Ableton support will accept to change it as I clearly see this as a hardware problem on some of the production. Unfortunately I guess this could be a serious financial problem for them...