Ableton Forum

It sounds simple so it should be right? Thing is i dont know diddly about how to make max recognize my enttec dmx usb pro (usb to dmx box), or how to tell it "take midi in on this note and feed its velocity to this dmx channel". If you help me with this i promise to give a room full of people seizures.

oh, so that lets me find my dmx device, that solves half the battle, but how do i do the other stuff?

the manual has expected inputs, aka lists and data to be sent to it, using the midi externals you will be able to get the note number, velocity etc, then use max to rearrange and send that into the external

dmax is crap. thanks zalo, should just be a numbers game then.

Could I ask what problems you have with DMaX? I'm currently working on the new version and would appreciate your feedback.

If you know your way around M4L and the olaf's external then sure - write your own, else I would suggest starting with DMAX. If you start form scratch, then it will take a while to get someting up and running that is reasonably reliable - its an interesting learning curve at least

In the end I wrote my own after trying DMAX for a few days - cant remember why now - I think mainly to get CPU use sensible and there were various other things I didnt like about its implementation, particularly its fixture patches and generally channel organisation etc.

However, its still a great starting point and unlike mine, is actually released, and supported etc (even if I do personally find mine way way better in everyday use - each to their own)

Im off on a bit of a different tangent as far as lighting control goes now. Ive come to the conclusion that the conventional fixture orientated approach to it just doesnt work very well for actually programming a show with a decent number of complex fixtures rather than just messing about with the concept and doing really simple stuff.

OP: For the kind of thing you are looking at doing, you will need to either use the DMAX master device (the easiest way), or connect to the external directly which takes a bit more effort. The biggest effort is in properly throttling Live parameter automation down to a rate that DMX actually needs and keeping the CPU use sensible.

Im guessing you are fairly new to DMX and light show programming - triggering flashes tends to be something that folks start with and think is a great idea until they try to use it in an actual show and then wonder why everyone runs and hides - bit like over-use of strobes

I made the patch using just the external, wasnt too hard once i thought about the conversion process (hint: noteoff's are read as 0's simultaneous to the actual note velocity, strip em).

To the above, dmax is crap because you cant use midi to program lights with it, only automation. One of the more retarded design decisions ive come across recently.


So to anyones whose asking themselves "can a lightshow be programmed with midi", the answer is "yes, if you are a programmer, in C++ that is". The organization of light configurations reached clusterfuk proportions due to ableton's design flaws governing the organization of tracks. Now im battling with the issue of how do you do something like a fade using midi, considering that there can only be one velocity value per note. Quoted from the link above:

On the other hand side it's fun thinking about what you might be able to do with things like Ableton's built in Midi Effects like Velocity, etc....

Thats probably because you haven't tried actually doing it. The velocity effect applies to midi clips, not midi notes, therefore it doesnt do anything, because its existence has no purpose. So that leaves me with either automating a m4l slider to make up for the difference and having that add a multiple or two to the clusterfuk (obviously if it is possible it wont be recorded as an editable keyframe), or creating 32'nd notes and very very carefully drawing a fade.

This is not really ableton's fault though, as an audio program it works fine, but as a lighting program its worthless. Hey, its still 100x better than any lighting program ive found. You want to know clusterfuk? Try editing using milliseconds on a playlist instead of bars on a timeline.

not sure totally understood, but you could make an arpegiator folowed by a velocity module?


btw are you the poof we saw on usine forums? didn't you manage to get that working with usine and the dmx module?

Thats probably because you haven't tried actually doing it. The velocity effect applies to midi clips, not midi notes, therefore it doesnt do anything

well,

you could, for example create a clip of 16 notes with a velocity value of 64. put a midi effect rack into the track, put a midi velocity effect into it and automate the parameters of the effect to alter the output. i tried it and it worked. not perfectly but at least 'something' happended. i could, for example, create pan/tilt positioning and/ or motion (well... since every channel can be controlled you can also set the gobo wheel etc.).see the first two videos on the linked page. they are done that way (more or less).

it sure isn't perfect at all but if you want to achieve a perfect lightshow you better take a lighting console and someone who's done that before =) (me, for example....)

whatever. if you don't take it too seriously it can be fun.

poof wrote:So to anyones whose asking themselves "can a lightshow be programmed with midi", the answer is "yes, if you are a programmer, in C++ that is". The organization of light configurations reached clusterfuk proportions due to ableton's design flaws governing the organization of tracks.

i am curious what the design flaw is, it seems to me for a light show you would only need one track, or are you dealing with more than 128 lights?

poof wrote:Now im battling with the issue of how do you do something like a fade using midi, considering that there can only be one velocity value per note.

obviously you are going to need to retrigger the note for each step down, which if you were manually doing it from a light controller it would be doing the same thing, since as you move a slider an increment it sends out the channel and then value each time

here is an idea

time values of 0 = no fade, time is measured in 16th notes

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this is not an attack but it feels like you didnt spend enough time thinking about what the best way was and then study up on max and figuring it out, pretty much every single post you have made on this forum is related to this one lighting project, and when you didnt get the answers you wanted you blamed ableton (ableton sucks, ableton has bugs, ableton has design flaws)

the majority of questions you have can be found quickly by googling up on midi and sitting down and taking the time to learn max, if you sit down and devote a week to learning those 2 things everything will be easier for you

you could, for example create a clip of 16 notes with a velocity value of 64. put a midi effect rack into the track, put a midi velocity effect into it and automate the parameters of the effect to alter the output. i tried it and it worked. not perfectly but at least 'something' happended.

velocity effect didnt do shit for me. still doesnt no matter what i do, ableton still reports same velocity values.

i am curious what the design flaw is, it seems to me for a light show you would only need one track, or are you dealing with more than 128 lights?

if every light only had one channel and i wanted to compose entirely on one track. then all i'd have to do is spend 15 minutes trying to figure out what c note i was on and what channel that corresponded to and what light that was for and what function it served.

this is not an attack but it feels like you didnt spend enough time thinking about what the best way was and then study up on max and figuring it out, pretty much every single post you have made on this forum is related to this one lighting project, and when you didnt get the answers you wanted you blamed ableton (ableton sucks, ableton has bugs, ableton has design flaws)

the majority of questions you have can be found quickly by googling up on midi and sitting down and taking the time to learn max, if you sit down and devote a week to learning those 2 things everything will be easier for you

wow, way to be a dick, as if you have any idea how much time ive actually invested in this. Ive sat through every tutorial max has and found all 3 pages that exist for midi that actually bother to explain anything of value. hell it took me a week to figure out ableton sends noteoff velocity at the exact same time as its noteon. yeah, must be my fault some asshole engineer with no clue of what the effect of his shitty myopic design choices might have on the world just wasted a week of my time trying to unravel his shit, same reason it was everyones fault some asshole engineer thought it would be a good idea to save a few bytes by using a two digit year representation and sent the whole world into a panic.


so i tried your patch and it didnt do anything, but why would it, obviously the issue is that effects only affect tracks and not notes, and given the only way to control lighting is on a note by note basis, that pretty much leaves lighting designers with some overpriced underdesigned hardware solutions, or a program that doesnt allow fades or moves.

ive tried going so far as to have one note per track with the velocity effect and it sorta worked for a while then stopped. if ableton worked as it is supposed to then this whole process would be simple and flexible, but because things like setting a track to send out to another track cant be done without some intermediate track or just having the velocity effect work reliably, im left with this broken pos excuse of a midi editor and no way to program lighting.

well, no use complaining to you folks, the problem is quite evidently abletons shitty design. i can only hope abletons popularity is due to its fisher price mac ripoff appearance and not its functionality, or else thats pretty much it for any chance of artistic expression. Damn, maybe i should just join the crowd and do music.