Novation ZeRO SL Mk 2

[digitalbeat]

Has someone tested the Novation with Ableton?

[bhuvan]

I had bit of a confusing time with the two together. The faders are supposed to toggle from volume to sends but that doesn't happen consistently and I couldn't use this function live on the gig. It was a but frustrating trying to get this to work and didn't work out in the end.

I found it easier to use the hard knobs rather than the automap knobs. Which means that most of the time you are not looking at using all the parameters of a plug. Since you know before hand what you will want to tweak, you can customise the sl to work in a particular way. Which means - learn and assign. But this in respect to a live situation. In the studio, it's a good thing for the controller to have all the parameters readily accessible to tweak. The flip side is that if you are not controlling the whole show, you have the liberty of going deeper in to a sound and so a plug completely opened out on the controller in front of you serves well.

I also used the internal clock of the sl to sync two ableton machines and as expected, it couldn't really hold them together.

Hope this helps.

[3phase]

I also used the internal clock of the sl to sync two ableton machines and as expected, it couldn't really hold them together.

Hope this helps.

shouldnt the expectation be otherwise? but ok..you are wright

[bhuvan]

Dedicated clock machines can be quite expensive for holding the time tight. So a MIDI controller doing the job through a USB cable seems tough. Besides it's so light! lol

[3phase]

Dedicated clock machines can be quite expensive for holding the time tight. So a MIDI controller doing the job through a USB cable seems tough. Besides it's so light! lol

Has nothing to do with the quality of the clock.. ik..in case of novation drivers that is probably also a problem. but in general one should expect clock syncing to work in the year 2010 AD

That no other daw has clock slave ability is an excuse for ableton to have an inferior performance there.. but live is there to replace hardware workstations like an akai mpc or yamaha or roland devices on stage.. its not only a daw..and therfore it has to be as good on the clock as the other stage computer tools. That is not a too high demand in a world where your cellphone is doing realtime fft processing


But.. saying this over and over again wont make ableton face the challange.. users shouldnt except the wobbel syncing as a fact of nature..
Because its not a natural problem..its a design problem.. just a question of software design and how much timing precission there is valued...

So users that come along the problem should send a mail to theire soft and hardware companys and ask when they plan to fix it, to show the demand. The only way that we one day see this working properly.
Companys have to see that trouble free syncing is a sales argument not just a redundant feature...

[koranek]

It works OK for me. My biggest gripe is the 8 endless rotary encoders when using the Live template. You will use these when you Blue-Hand-select a Live device or rack. The problem is in the speed or resolution of the encoders. They are very slow so that you can't really sweep a parameter from max to min in one twist. There appears to be no way to change that when using the Live template.

When using Automap with third party plugs, there is an encoder acceleration setting option that lets you switch between slow, medium, or fast. The fast setting lets you sweep from max to min in one twist. However, this option disappears when you move back to the Live template.

I've posted this here, in the support section, on Novation's forum, and Novation's tech support. Nobody has given me an answer, although Ableton did have me try a few debugging things that didn't really solve the problem. Novation never responded in any way.

If you have an encoder that you have to turn 2 and 1/2 turns to get it to sweep from max to min, it makes it pretty much useless. It's the main control knob you will use with Live's devices and racks.