The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by login » Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:34 pm

Anyone with experience with both? can you coment on pros and cons?

Also, are there any more templates/modifications of Mu on the user community that could expand the official template funtionality?

tchan
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by tchan » Fri Dec 09, 2011 4:12 am

not a fair comparison. to get mu working you'll need to purchase max for live and the lemur app. if you just want to control live, touchable is great, more than capable, and great value.

the mu/lemur/m4l ecosystem definitely packs a powerful punch. however i think it'll take a few more months before you see a new level of craziness go down that will justify the investment (relatively speaking of course). i have no doubt an army of new developers will be bringing the heat to lemur iPad development :)

fyi: i have a lemur, touchable, griid & lemur for iPad. been trying to leave the lemur at home and rock live shows using two iPads running griid & touchable. however i'm really digging lemur for iPad so i'm most likely going to be rocking mu + griid on my iPads. after all, i still have old lemur templates that i can use...or maybe i'm just too sentimental :P

ambientidm
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by ambientidm » Sun Dec 11, 2011 5:45 pm

tchan wrote:not a fair comparison. to get mu working you'll need to purchase max for live and the lemur app. if you just want to control live, touchable is great, more than capable, and great value.

the mu/lemur/m4l ecosystem definitely packs a powerful punch. however i think it'll take a few more months before you see a new level of craziness go down that will justify the investment (relatively speaking of course). i have no doubt an army of new developers will be bringing the heat to lemur iPad development :)

fyi: i have a lemur, touchable, griid & lemur for iPad. been trying to leave the lemur at home and rock live shows using two iPads running griid & touchable. however i'm really digging lemur for iPad so i'm most likely going to be rocking mu + griid on my iPads. after all, i still have old lemur templates that i can use...or maybe i'm just too sentimental :P
what is the benefit of griid over the lemur app
mu cannot do what cliip does though right?

suburbmusic
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by suburbmusic » Sun Dec 11, 2011 10:01 pm

...so how is the clip behaviour in the mu script? are they shown like the clips in touchable with the progress line?
if yes this is a path to go for me....or touchable would offer kind of an editor that would be dope....i found it really complicating when using just 1 ipad in a live situation to get access to all parameters quickly

hoffman2k
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by hoffman2k » Mon Dec 12, 2011 9:54 am

Probably easier to make sense of all of this in terms of who developed it and when.
Mu came shortly after ST8's LiveOSC and before LiveControl.
Touchable came after LiveControl and was based on it.
The Clip editing in Griid was done by ST8 and came after Touchable.
Making Mu one of the most outdated options and Griid/Touchable the most current.
The guys who worked on Mu later formed Liine, who now released the Lemur App.

With the Lemur app out there, you're not really bound to the Griid/Touchable app.
At this point you can use all the best features of all the OSC based scripts and combine them in a Lemur layout, which is still the granddaddy of OSC Controllers.

Chris / touchAble
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by Chris / touchAble » Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:15 pm

@hoffman2k

Prior to working on touchAble i did a simple iPhone layout called TouchControl: http://maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=208
It was heavily inspired by LiveControl for the monome - which was already out and being discussed on the monome forums long before the release of M4L.

I would guess that most of the current Ableton Live touch-controllers are partly inspired by ST8s work for the monome.

to answer the question of the topic starter: touchAble - of course! :D

Chris

hoffman2k
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by hoffman2k » Mon Dec 12, 2011 6:14 pm

Cool. Its a small world when it comes to the Live API.
To think, most of this stuff started by abusing Mackie Control support.
Looking forward to some more API features to see what happens on both the python and MFL side :D

- Bjorn

Zeddy
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by Zeddy » Wed Dec 14, 2011 8:50 am

hoffman2k wrote:Probably easier to make sense of all of this in terms of who developed it and when.
Mu came shortly after ST8's LiveOSC and before LiveControl.
Touchable came after LiveControl and was based on it.
The Clip editing in Griid was done by ST8 and came after Touchable.
Making Mu one of the most outdated options and Griid/Touchable the most current.
The guys who worked on Mu later formed Liine, who now released the Lemur App.
I was wondering if you could expand on this a little bit Hoffman? I'm a bit new to all this stuff, so I'm still trying to get the lay of the land. What does LiveControl do (enable Griid/Touchable to do) that Mu would not be able to? Or, what is the 'benefit' of LiveControl? What are the cons of Mu being 'outdated' in comparison to Griid and Touchable? And on the flip-side, what do Griid/Touchable do better than Mu because they are more current?

hoffman2k
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by hoffman2k » Wed Dec 14, 2011 6:48 pm

Zeddy wrote:
hoffman2k wrote:Probably easier to make sense of all of this in terms of who developed it and when.
Mu came shortly after ST8's LiveOSC and before LiveControl.
Touchable came after LiveControl and was based on it.
The Clip editing in Griid was done by ST8 and came after Touchable.
Making Mu one of the most outdated options and Griid/Touchable the most current.
The guys who worked on Mu later formed Liine, who now released the Lemur App.
I was wondering if you could expand on this a little bit Hoffman? I'm a bit new to all this stuff, so I'm still trying to get the lay of the land. What does LiveControl do (enable Griid/Touchable to do) that Mu would not be able to? Or, what is the 'benefit' of LiveControl? What are the cons of Mu being 'outdated' in comparison to Griid and Touchable? And on the flip-side, what do Griid/Touchable do better than Mu because they are more current?
Mu is basically an advanced Mackie Control emulation. Touchable and Griid are apps that are constantly updated, which means in some cases they require less workarounds.
They make use of the newer ways to interact with Clips. For example Griid has a great MIDI Clip editor, which is based on the LiveControl Clip Sequencer feature.
Clip colors changed, so Mu probably needs an update for that. I can't recall if there was a Live 8 specific update and how long ago it was. So that may already have been fixed.
Its pointless for me to really give you any feedback on these apps. I'm just an observer that keeps an eye on anything related to the Live API. Personally I use MFL in combination with TouchOSC and am soon switching to Lemur.

Zeddy
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by Zeddy » Thu Dec 15, 2011 4:08 am

Thanks. That clears things up a bit for me. I'm just going to hold off in the meantime on this whole Lemur thing and see what develops. It should be interesting though

Bugayev
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by Bugayev » Sun Dec 18, 2011 5:13 pm

Hey guys,

If I may add my bit as one of the creators of Mu...

Mu has nothing to do with Mackie Control emulation. Mu was built from the ground up as an open, community controller. Unlike Griid, the code for every bit of Mu is exposed either in the Lemur template or the accompanying Max for Live device. You can create custom layouts for any Audio or MIDI device, or even for 3rd party effects or instruments. Users are creating and sharing their work, you can add these layouts to your Mu installation and use them immediately. Mu is about complete control of Ableton Live and about Device Controller customisation.

The Mu 1.2 package also includes a Framework with lots of handy tools to use Lemur with Ableton Live. This includes a patch to auto-detect your Lemur and load a template. So you can save an ALS and when you load it up your custom Lemur template (doesn't even need to be the Mu layout!) is automatically loaded and ready to go. Support for multiple Lemurs is also included, as well as a few layouts to control default MFL devices from Cycling 74 such as the step sequencer.

Hope this clears things up a bit. ;)

Thanks for the interest!

Nick

grooverb
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by grooverb » Sun Dec 18, 2011 5:42 pm

Its always good to see the developers commenting on this forum :)

hoffman2k
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by hoffman2k » Sun Dec 18, 2011 6:00 pm

Bugayev wrote:Hey guys,

If I may add my bit as one of the creators of Mu...

Mu has nothing to do with Mackie Control emulation. Mu was built from the ground up as an open, community controller. Unlike Griid, the code for every bit of Mu is exposed either in the Lemur template or the accompanying Max for Live device. You can create custom layouts for any Audio or MIDI device, or even for 3rd party effects or instruments. Users are creating and sharing their work, you can add these layouts to your Mu installation and use them immediately. Mu is about complete control of Ableton Live and about Device Controller customisation.

The Mu 1.2 package also includes a Framework with lots of handy tools to use Lemur with Ableton Live. This includes a patch to auto-detect your Lemur and load a template. So you can save an ALS and when you load it up your custom Lemur template (doesn't even need to be the Mu layout!) is automatically loaded and ready to go. Support for multiple Lemurs is also included, as well as a few layouts to control default MFL devices from Cycling 74 such as the step sequencer.

Hope this clears things up a bit. ;)

Thanks for the interest!

Nick
Hey Nick,

My bad for not being clear. What I meant is that pretty much all the Live API stuff comes from Mackie Support added to Live which evolved into the Live API we know today.
Before python scripts, we used this: http://web.archive.org/web/200308110250 ... /MCMap.htm

Clip launchers came from a feature added to Live 3 for Hawtin/Henke, which allowed clips assigned to a note to output clip status.

I missed the part about Mu now being MFL. Been busy and haven't been able to keep up with everything. That definitely makes it super flexible.
So will there be a thing like Griid for Mu? The only thing we'd miss is the zooming, but that seems like a nice Lemur request :)

Feel free to correct me if I got my history wrong. Things may have gotten a bit screwed up in my head. Its about 8 years of history that isn't really written down anywhere. But it all traces back to Richie (Live CTRL) and Robert (MonoDeck) and their methods of controlling Live.
And got accelerated by the arrival of Novation Automap.

Its not all really important. Since I missed that Mu is now MFL, I stand corrected on what is most up to date. And I'm probably one of the few who actually cares about silly trivia like this. Sorry for the mixup.

- Bjorn

db120
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by db120 » Mon Dec 26, 2011 10:07 pm

I'm thinking of pulling the trigger on the Lemur, but first can someone tell me the advantages of Mu over Touchable? Is it that MU automaps EVERY Live device (operator?) and displays it like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5-idJJ5Y4E ?? The way Touchable does with some Live devices like autofilter, eq8, etc?

Adonis
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Re: The obvious question: mu vs touchable

Post by Adonis » Mon Dec 26, 2011 11:05 pm

[djadonis206]

How timely!

I'm messing around with both at the moment. I would recommend TouchAble. Right out the box it's simple, yet complex, and has all, and I mean ALL, the bells and whistles. TouchAble has everything Mu for Lemur has and more down to the most simplest of things like an Overdub button. TouchAble is also able to manipulate 3rd party plugs, Mu for Lemur can't unless you rack the 3rd party or create your own device.

Mu for Lemur is customizable I guess. I'm trying to learn to do that but it's proving to be a challenge. I want to add an overdub button and custom devices for my most used 3rd party plugs like Massive, WOW, and dub delay. Creating devices is proving to be a pain as well but I think I'm getting close. I don't think you can customize TouchAble but I could be wrong.

Also, Lemur @ $49.99 plus $187 for Max4Live is kind of ridiculous when you can get TouchAble for $25.

So with that said, if you're into geeking out and making your own devices and customizing sh*t I'd swoop up Lemur but if you want instant fun explosion with all the bells and whistles for an incredible value get TouchAble.

Can anyone help me make devices for Mu for Lemur? The Mu manual doesn't really give a step by step

I spent damn near $300 only to realize TouchAble is the one. I sort of feel compelled to learn Max and Lemur editor given the amount of money I spent
Last edited by Adonis on Mon Dec 26, 2011 11:16 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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