Ableton Forum

Hey first post, great board. I'm set on using Live, looks awesome gonna pick it up over the summer when 5 comes out. But I don't think I can give up being able to control a record with turntables. A lot of people who can't give up vinyl turn to Finalscratch. That hardware is overpriced, poor quality, and only works to my knowlege with Traktor, which just perpetuates old styles of DJing.

And yet the concept of timecoded vinyl is brilliant and I want to use it to be able to control songs in Live. Is this within the boundries of what Live can do? (meaning reverse and fastforward a track in real-time like finalscratch can)

If so, there has to be one of these options:

A) Another timecoded vinyl deal that isn't a rip off like finalscratch.
B) A way to reverse-engineer the finalscratch system by looking at the data on one of the Finalscratch timecoded CD's (yes, they sell these for cd decks) and create a plugin (really really hard and inviting lawsuits like crazy)
C) A midi or USB controller that could give me a feel similar to vinyl or a CD turntable
D) A way to use this with a computer: http://www.tascamdj.com/TT-M1.html This product by far looks the most amazing, but again it's proprietary and there's no way minus a reverse engineering miracle that it could hook up to a computer as far as I can tell.

I know this is a common frustration for people who are caught in between two DJing worlds. It seems like it'd be so easy to bridge the gap if Finalscratch wasn't so proprietary. I've looked long and hard but there don't seem to be any MIDI or USB or anything controllers that mimic the function of a deck.

Hopefully I'm missing something, so I'd love suggestions. All I really want to do is to be able to manipulate audio in that same rotating disc way that comes with turntables or even tabletop CD decks (like the pioneer or numark ones)

http://www.mspinky.com/

This may be your style

go for SSL, Serato Scratch Live...its the best thing around and its made by Rane, so quality pure all the way

mspinky looks like the business - anybody else using it?

to be honest i use vinyl & ableton 4 and soon a cdx too, and me personally i dont see the point in a vinyl type controller for ableton as it isnt a dj specific app like traktor or ssl or fs2. stick to the decks for that, what i do is rip from vinyl for some track to use on cd/ableton, ie i can play the tune on vinyl, scratch in on the cdx and have a loop/sample/fx or whatever running on ableton. but i did come into ableton as a production tool and started to use it as a dj tool also once i got a laptop.

Okay so it looks like this is possible, thanks for the tips, I had forgotten seeing that Ms. Pinky thing awhile back. On the outside it looks crude, but according to the developer it's really simple software:

http://www.creativesynth.com/INTERVIEWS ... pinky.html

He talks about being able to use it as a VST plugin, or simply as a controller you can map to functions (which is really exciting, imagine mapping effects or other parameters to a turntable w/ a crossfader)

I'll email the developer about it as soon as gmail gets back up. (grrr) If I can't use Ms. Pinky directly as a controller in Live, this seems like a solid alternative anyways. But I still think the two concepts can be integrated.

if you find a way to implement a SSL/F2/MissPinky way of controlling LIVE then you can make a lot of money. I would be the first to pay for it.

Make it happen

JohnDP

No, you wouldn't make money like that.

Software exists to do it: FS2, SSL, MsPinky, DJDecks, PCDJ Scratch, Mixvibes DVS, Mixvibes Pro 6, and a few others.

Live really wouldn't bennifit from it because it has nothing to do with what live was supposed to do.

Live is a DAW that just happens to have features that make it fast enough for DJ use. I mean, there is no way to have both vinyl control and the quantization and time stretching that everyone loves Live for.

If you want to incorporate them, consider using Live as an effects box with your turntables going first to live, through whatever effects you want, and then out to your mixer.

If you input them seperately and recorded everything, then you could go in aftewards, apply warp marrkers and fix any tempo glitches you had after the fact...but it would still be after the fact: great for mix cds, but impossible for live performance.

Or, if you want real vinyl control, stop complaining and go find a software package that works. Paul van Dyk uses FS2. I saw him a couple months ago at a club here, and there was not a single problem throughout his set, so it must not suck that much.

My first choce of them would be MixVibes Pro 6.

But you can't directly compare them to Live, they're completely different programs intended for completely different uses.

moostapha wrote:Software exists to do it: FS2, SSL, MsPinky, DJDecks, PCDJ Scratch, Mixvibes DVS, Mixvibes Pro 6, and a few others.

Live really wouldn't bennifit from it because it has nothing to do with what live was supposed to do.

Live is a DAW that just happens to have features that make it fast enough for DJ use. I mean, there is no way to have both vinyl control and the quantization and time stretching that everyone loves Live for.

I agree--the whole point of Live is that you don't have to worry about tempo, because Live takes care of that for you. While there will always be people who push the limits of Live and use it in innovative ways, it seems like other tools are better suited to integrating turntables with computers.

IMHO, a better use of Live for those who still like vinyl (and it's something I can't yet give up, either!) is to sync Live to your turntables via MIDI. Hawtin does this, for example. He used to use a BPM-to-MIDI tool--I think it was the Redsound Microsync, though I'm not sure what he's using these days with his custom controller.

Basically, a tool like this detects the tempo of your records and generates MIDI clock to match it, allowing you to mix things in Live directly with vinyl. It's pretty slick--I've always used a loop sampler to complement turntables, and using Live in place of that is the next (and much more powerful) step in that direction.

i worked out a way of controlling lives tempo and syncing it to decks using mis pinky and a MAX?MSP patch. you can cue from the method, you still have to trigger it via midi or keyboard/mouse, but you can nudge and push the tempo via a set of decks.

heres the thread. http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... ives+tempo

it does work as well, someone trie it out and its pretty tight.

Live 5 will allow the control of transport via MIDI.

I guess we'll have to wait to see the exact implementation, but it would open the door to more "turntable-like" methods for controlling Live.

rs

opps that should have been

bod wrote:....you can't cue from the method, you still have to trigger it via midi or keyboard/mouse, but you can nudge and push the tempo via a set of decks......

After a few years of playing Live by itself i have decided to work with djs or integrate vinyl into my sets. Though it's called Live, it's really not suited for playing with external sources out of the box. The main oversight being that it is very difficult to map the tempo to a controller in a way that allows for smooth precise changes without sudden or abrupt jumps that would be instant death at a club.

Here is the solution i've come up with. Get a Griffin Powermate and a copy of Max. That's the sucky part.

The powermate is a great little metal knob that you can assign keyboard shortcuts to. It's used mostly as a volume knob for multimedia programs but it is very well made so it has a very smooth and reliable signal. with Max and Live you can use it to control any rewire or midi controllable parameter.

I have it setup so that when I turn the knob left the tempo goes down in .5 bpm increments. When i turn the knob right it goes up in .5 bpm increments. When I press the knob it restarts Live to the first bar.

My technique is to tap out the rough tempo with the tempo tap and then lock it in with the knob. It's proven to be a very easy way to beatmatch to a record. Hope this helps!

hi, thanks for the tip, is there a good way to do those 0.5% increments for instance using the letter Q for "decrease by 0.5" and W for "increase by 0.5" or something like that?

Max's rewire object's tempo is not in bpms but ticks so I have been using 30 ticks which is about .5 bpm. I think I might make it so pushing down and turning is 2 bpm and turning without pushing down is .5 so I have two levels of sensitivity.

The really frustrating thing is that for some unknown reason the Live Interface does not recognize the powermate's key commands which would make it a simple matter of assigning the up and down arrow to the powermate, instead you have to use the key object with two select objects (one for each direction) in Max to add and subtract ticks to the rewire tempo object each time the key is triggered (which depends on the sensitivity level in the powermate config screen). I have another select which is used to reset live to the start of the track when I push down the powermate. I'll put a max patch on my site when I have worked all the bugs out.

The only problem is that Max can only accept key strokes if it is the active window, but its not a huge deal because Live's midi and audio work when it is in the background, so I leave a little max window at the bottom of live and switch between them. If you are on mac you can use the HI object (Max 4.5.2) which will run in the background.