Ableton Forum

OK a sequel to my popular "open browser" hotkey script... Ableton gave us "zoom display" which is brilliant for editing Operator oscillator partials, and vocoder filter bands... but it's buried in the preferences dialog duh...

So here it is, nasty flickery HACK but hey, it works.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/54pt4f

Doubleclick the .exe script (LiveZoom_Coarse or Fine) you want to use, it will run in the taskbar & you don't need Autohotkeys.

Zoom out/in: Keys "[" and "]"
Reset to 100%: "\"

There are coarse & fine zooming scripts and there are fast & slow versions, if fast doesn't work the slower script probably will.

If you want the zoom steps coarser or finer or different hotkeys, you will need autohotkeys which is free from http://www.autohotkey.com, you can edit the .ahk scripts with notepad, instructions are in the ReadMe, I have put comments in the code also.

Happy Zooming!

If you find it useful please post back in this thread so the thread stays bumped for a while for the benefit of others.

If an Ableton employee sees this (Amaury?) please try it and have a little session doing some partials drawing in Operator zoom in zoom out.... nice no? Should be a feature! it kinda gets around the limitations of the devices strip which is getting a bit cramped. Tabs like in Sampler help... a little bit but then you can only look at a page at a time.

Nice idea, with my poor eyesight especially, but it doesn't seem to quite work (running Windows XP, sp3). The square brackets briefly bring up the preferences dialogue but that's it. No change to zoom factor.

I thought I'd take a look at autohotkey.com to see if there was an easy tweak, but how do I get the .ahk to be able to edit it?

Thanks for your work on this, anyway.

Cheers

Thanks for telling me, I tested it on 3 different computers fast & slow and here it works but I can see the mouse going off the preferences box sometimes, let me tweak it and upload it again, I'll include the uncompiled scripts as well then (I forgot it was late)

I'd be very surprised if they don't make this a feature really soon. It should be key mappable,
let alone accessible without having to go through preferences to get to it.

I changed it, and it's faster too. (link in original post updated please download again)
Once you have tried it, you won't want to be without it

Thanks djsynchro.

On looking at the autohotkeys file I realised (after a while) that as I use a left-handed mouse I needed to change the click left to click right! Still doesn't select the Look/Feel tab on preferences, but if I've previously selected the tab, works fine. There seems to be a comma missing between
MouseClick left (or MouseClick right in my case), in the .ahk files anyway, but fixing that hasn't sorted the tab issue.

The first comma is optional (or the script wouldn't have compiled) but yes, I did forget it.
try setting the last parameter (0) of the mouse commands to 2 (that means they will go slower) and see if that fixes it and please let me know. It works fine here (obviously) on two different PCs is your PC fast or slow?

Heh, this is so bootleg... I love it. Thanks for the script. Hopefully this gets implemented in Live soon.

Ghetto!

All working now, with that switch from 0 to 2. Not sure where you'd put my PC in fast/slow - it's over 4 years old so not zippy but was fair spec at the time (3GHz Pentium 4, now with 2.5Gig memory)

Thanks again

Thanx for letting me know yo... changing tha parameter makes the mousemove shizzle go slower that's always the reason hotkeys scripts behave erratically, will recompile like that.

Done & updated the link!

I appreciate this effort, I really do. I just think this is a ridiculous "feature" to have and then bury it inside preferences. This is almost as classic as burying the Edit button inside project management. Of course nothing takes the cake like not having mouse scroll wheel zooming, but I digress.

Anyways, the point is that being able to zoom in and out is a great idea, but not having it mapable or easily accessible is dumb.