Ableton Forum

i'm wondering how to assign MIDI commands to cycle through the devices on a selected track, so that i can select them for MIDI control without using the mouse. i know the APC does this, but i was told by an ableton rep at a demo that this is a new generally assignable control now (along the lines of scrolling up and down through scenes using mapped controls).

i know that individual devices can be assigned buttons to select them; my question concerns whether there's a way of scrolling through them (so that i don't need a separate control for every device).

also (and maybe i'm just getting greedy now) is there any way to cycle through selected tracks using a MIDI control, in the same way?

Its all about the Audio Rack

Create a bunch of chains and MIDI map a Knob to the Chain Select

Have I said enough?

thanks but that's not really what i'm talking about.

the APC40 actually lets you move left and right through the various devices on a given track, so that between the track select buttons and the device select buttons, you can make any device in the set the object of focus for use with the device parameter control knobs.

the way you propose would first of all require that every device be given its own separate chain, and second of all would not help if you wanted to switch between devices on different tracks. what's more, for each rack of devices you set up, you'd need to assign as separate MIDI control to each chain select, whereas with the APC, you just need two buttons (plus the track select buttons) to select any device you want.

the more i search the more it seems this is an APC-exclusive feature and is not MIDI-mappable, contrary to what the ableton rep said at the demo. i hope i'm mistaken though! this seems like a simple feature to implement and would be incredibly useful.

true - ive heard that mentioned here a couple times too.

looking in the manual under the apc chapter it looks like it has "Device Left" and "Device Right" buttons. . i cant figure out how that translates to midi mapping though. . it must be possible.

ka-BUMP

anyone have any official verdict on this? abes? bueller?

someone else correct me if i'm wrong.

if you have live 8, you can midi map the instrument selection bar... so as long as the instruments stay constant in your set, you could bind seperate keys to each instrument, or bind a single control number to all the instruments and set a different range for each one, and bind that CC# to an encoder on your midi control.

yeah, no?

won't help ya if you add instruments on the fly however.

Majnun wrote:someone else correct me if i'm wrong.

if you have live 8, you can midi map the instrument selection bar... so as long as the instruments stay constant in your set, you could bind seperate keys to each instrument, or bind a single control number to all the instruments and set a different range for each one, and bind that CC# to an encoder on your midi control.

yeah, no?

won't help ya if you add instruments on the fly however.

exactly. what happens when you have a huuuge set with shitloads of devices?
gets pretty tedious pretty fast.

hmmm hopefully this will be akin to Mackie Control settings and we can hack our own controllers into that scheme. I haven't had time to poke around the file directory yet to find out... I'm sure someone will beat me to it.

Here's what I don't understand... when Ableton makes mackie control, or APC etc... why don't they just easily expose those as midi mapable things?

You know, hit midi map mode, click a special button, it pops up a picture of the mackie/APC and you can click on in with the mouse, then send a midi message to bind that function.

Grumble.

someone on this thread :http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=111336

mentioned that it is possible to map the left / right device select to a pad kontrol, but i cant get it working the way he explains (and on my trigger finger).

he says to map the controller to select more than one device in a row on in a rack, but i can only get it to map to one.

once you have the blue hand on one effect or rack, the left and right cursor allow you to navigate between fx. If you can produce/translate keystrokes you're sorted. You could also use Mackie Control Emulation - midi cc's 96-100, ch.1 - allow for left, right, up, down, launch - obviously you want the left and right.

Is there anything special to do to get mackie emulation to work in Live 8?

Can't seem to get it working (or I don't remember how to do it anymore)... is it simply a matter of selecting Mackie Control from the Options as a control service, and then sending midi data along channel one? I must be missing something basic.

- set up your midi controller to send notes C7-E7 (think those are 96-100), or cc 96-100 - must be at velocity 127, and midi channel 1
- Pref's \ Midi Sync \ Control Surfaces - select MackieControl in left hand box, then your midi controllers input in middle "input" box. Close prefs.
- select a clip slot - press your controller's assigned keys/buttons - see if the selected clip changes.

things to check - some midi controllers treat note numbers differently (e.g. Korg) - go up or down an octave. Likewise Midi Channel 1 is 1 of 16, which your controller might treat as 0 of 15.

If that doesn't work, you need to do some searching for Mackie emulation on this here forum ... although someone just bumped a post with links to it recently.

Lol... that was me who bumped it.

Yeah, I thought I did all that... I'll have to try again when I'm not super tired I guess.

gardenIMPERIVM wrote:i'm wondering how to assign MIDI commands to cycle through the devices on a selected track, so that i can select them for MIDI control without using the mouse. i know the APC does this, but i was told by an ableton rep at a demo that this is a new generally assignable control now (along the lines of scrolling up and down through scenes using mapped controls).

i know that individual devices can be assigned buttons to select them; my question concerns whether there's a way of scrolling through them (so that i don't need a separate control for every device).

also (and maybe i'm just getting greedy now) is there any way to cycle through selected tracks using a MIDI control, in the same way?

I'm not sure what the problem is. Just use the left and right arrow keys. I have the buttons on my MIDI controller using a key command to MIDI translator so that I have both the regular arrow keys and the arrow keys plus the option (alt) key. With this I can navigate between tracks, to the browser, to the scene column, and up and down from the track name row, to clip slots, to the devices with ease without using a mouse or the computer keyboard. Once I'm down at the devices, I just use the regular arrow keys buttons to scroll between devices.

Just to add to this

I've been trying to select (blue hand) different instruments in a rack with a single nob. It doesn't look like you can set a selection range like you might with say the chain selector. So I'm now thinking of using a midipipe to maybe convert CC values to notes.