BRAINSTORM: Push vs Audio Tracks

[triant]

so now that we have some tools for making push-hacking easier in M4L (courtesy of forum user flocked; see http://florianzand.de/push/), the first project that came to my mind is:

To Figure Out Something Useful for Push to Do When Audio Tracks are Selected.

this is obviously the biggest gap in push's functionality right now - when an audio track is selected, the central pads (plus many of the side buttons) do nothing at all. while i can only assume that ableton will come up with something useful to do with audio tracks in a future software update, we already have the means of adding this functionality ourselves, without actually changing any of the other existing functionality of the controller.

i want to spark a discussion here for brainstorming interface ideas for manipulating audio tracks/clips using push's pad grid and unused buttons (e.g. 'scales', 'accent', 'repeat', 'octave up/down', etc).

one obvious approach would be to do something with using loop-points, 'cue-points', etc. (even though cue points don't exist in live, they can more or less be simulated using max). maybe something buffer-shuffly? the real question is what kinds of tools would be most useful across the broadest diversity of audio clips (as they can of course range from one shots to short loops to song parts to entire songs). people's preference will certainly differ here, but that's why it's all the more useful to talk about it.

i'll be tinkering away at this project in the weeks to come, so if you have ideas/dreams about how you'd like to manipulate audio with push, post 'em here! i might incorporate the idea into my design, or someone else might incorporate it into theirs! this space is wide open.

[lo.key]

thats what im looking into right now actually. Ive decided to give another pass to implementing a mlr-style clip chopper for audio and midi clips, using the move_playing_position call to the clip. We gave it a go over on the monome forums some time back, but the method used a playing_position observer, and the timing just wasnt consistent enough given the low priority of live.observers, as the move_playing_position call requires a relative, rather than an absolute time point. I'm trying out a phasor~ based approach that i hope will be more playable.

[coleb]

an mlr style clip chopper for audio tracks would be amazing!

something (kind of) related: when using the push development kit - push_grid object, the pads output velocity and position. this is great because I made a device which allows the top quarter of the push pads to output notes for a drumrack even when in other notes. i.e. you could play a drum rack while the rest of the push grid is still in session mode. this is all for a live performance template i'm trying to make: i.e. a DJ set where you want to fire off samples on a drum rack without selecting that channel and having push take over the entire grid.

the problem is (and this could be a potential problem for using push's pads on an audio device): when you 'grab control' of push's pads, they seem to lose most of their sensitivity. adjusting the pads sensitivity from push does not change anything and the pads aren't very sensitive at all compared to when using push in native mode for notes. i would assume this arises because when grabbing control of the pads via the push_grid object, it disconnects the controls from the control surface script, and the control surface script tells the pads how to be more sensitive.

i wonder if there is a way to set the sensitivity of the pads using the LOM...?

[anamexis]

i wonder if there is a way to set the sensitivity of the pads using the LOM...?

if not in the LOM, it would be fairly trivial to set the sensitivity via M4L or even just a Velocity effect.
They're just basic logarithmic mappings.

[coleb]

i wonder if there is a way to set the sensitivity of the pads using the LOM...?

if not in the LOM, it would be fairly trivial to set the sensitivity via M4L or even just a Velocity effect.
They're just basic logarithmic mappings.

sensitivity is different from velocity curve. as you suggest, the logarithmic mappings translate your hit pressure into a velocity. these can be easily changed using the push user options (velocity curve) or in M4L. but i'm talking about sensitivity in terms of how hard you have to press a pad for it to register your press and output data. this can be adjusted separately from velocity curve in the user options by adjusting pad sensitivity.

for example, using push in session mode with live 9.0.0 the pads were very sensitive when triggering clips. the abes thought it was too sensitive, so they decreased the pad sensitivity for session mode with the live 9.0.2 update. this has been described by other users on the forum but adjusting the sensitivity of the pads only affects the pads when in note mode (scales or drum rack) but does not adjust the sensitivity for the buttons when in session mode.

from that example, it seems that pad sensitivity can be set depending on the mode the pads are in. it would be ideal to know how to do this when using the push_grid object from the push development kit. as it stands now, the pads are not very sensitive at all when using them with the push_grid object. so much so that it makes playing an instrument or drum rack from them almost impossible.