n9 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 31, 2019 10:44 pm
People inside Ableton have been pretty upfront that implementing MPE means a complete rewrite of the MIDI and MIDI clip components of Live, which is some of the oldest code in the codebase. It is a VERY expensive feature for them to implement because of this and is the kind of thing that could trigger a need to rewrite even larger amounts of code. My theory (as a Product Manager person in software) is that because of this the cost/value proposition of MPE just isn't anywhere high enough to justify the expense in time and money to do that rewrite and so they are waiting until the cost v benefit equation changes to do it....
I'm not so sure about that.
L10 brought the automation "page" (view toggle) which was completely new to L10. We can see that it was a big project and caused quite a bit of upheaval for users and took a while to bed in all the functionality - yet it actually exposes very little more functionality than the L9 automation. All it gained was more clarity, a bit more screen space.
So, what does that imply?
We could say that Ableton lost their damn minds and spent a few months of dev time implementing a slightly wonky feature that delivers little more than the older method. Or were they preparing the ground for further expansion in this area. Is this V1 of automation view.
What else happened? They added some automation shapes, and they improved the differentiation and exposure / UI selectors for modulation versus automation. Which means they have been updating the classes for automation and modulation. They've done work there. A new view, new interactions, new extensions, new UI.
a lot of work. For what appears to be (so far) not that massive a return.
They have two poly-aftertouch controllers (Push 1 & 2) which were very popular, created revenue, and which spew out tons of poly-aftertouch data which their main app cannot represent.
They are reasonably likely to release Push 3 or some other controller the next 12 months, and this is surely likely to produce as much or more control data.
It is my guess that when Push 3 or Prod 1 is released that Live 10.5 will be unveiled and the Automation view will expose new methods to handle Aftertouch data and MPE