Yeco: Touchscreen Windows/OS X for Ableton Live

[yur2die4]

http://discchord.com/blog/2016/5/16/scr ... -yeco.html

This looks promising. Sleek interface, has a keyboard. This is very close to what I've been wanting!

I think that some touch devs have been trying to do more production-based touch for Live (emulator comes to mind), but Yeco looks very focused on Live jamming etc.

I have not tried it, and don't know how well it works. I will keep an eye on it because it is something I've wanted.

[Buleriachk]

I just checked it out; it looks great! Not sure if it will do scales/chords like Push, but it would be an easy upgrade....

[yur2die4]

Have you seen the videos of the keyboard in use on their site? Also their hexagonal keyboard.

Apparently it can also act as a generic midi controller, but this feature works more easily on Windows. (Midi routing can be tricky on OS X according to the site).

So, I am not only curious about Live applications, but also alternatives.

Back to the keyboard, I know that a lot of other touch keyboards have strange behavior. This one seems more smooth, where it triggers at touch instead of triggering on release. The glissando looks fun in the video.

Going to try it out on Thursday.

[Buleriachk]

Well, I just tried it for a couple of hours; kind of disappointing for me.

Touch Screen Response is very laggy and slow for me (granted, I am running a Pentium dual core at 2.12 GHZ with an SSD - Dell 3147 2-in-one), and it doesn't track the underlying Live set very well. Latency was extremely slow with the drumkit, even with Asio4All running at 64 samples one has to install LoopMidi to get it to respond at all - no big deal, but something you should know about)

The program takes a long time to load (longer than Ableton), and doesn't track the time signature of the underlying set (mine is 3/4, and it always comes up 4/4).

Clip colors are flaky (they are just clip edges) on my computer (they flashed on and off occasionally for no apparent reason - they are mostly off. There are no clip names). Feedback on clip performance is not well implemented.

So some stuff works, some stuff doesn't and some stuff -- sort of....

It certainly won't replace my APC Mini or Launchpa95 in the near future; it is unusable for me in its present state, although it is certainly a start - I kind of blew $45 to test it, and it is certainly no Push 2, even at the price.... But live really needs a software implementation of Push 2 for touchscreen; I'm amazed they haven't implemented it already...

[YecoGraham]

Hi Buleriach,

It seems from your post that you are having hardware issues.
Although I must say we have tested successfully on similarly specced computers.
Latency is something that we have done our very best to minimize and we believe our response time is faster than any hardware controller we own.

The long load time, lack of clip names, colors, and dodgy play positions are definitely not features of the experience we are selling to our customers.
For that reason we are happy to offer you a full refund, please get in touch if you would like to avail of it.

All the best

Graham

[Buleriachk]

Thank you very much for the refund. I will certainly reconsider repurchasing it if I upgrade my portable computer and give it another shot - Ableton Live really needs a program like this. I have removed/uninstalled Yeco from my computer, and very much wish you and your company success in the future....

Chuck

[yur2die4]

I was able to try the software and had no issues with latency.

The startup had a progress bar and only took about 3 seconds for me (after doing the installation of all the files). (I use tobias' loopmidi for my internal routing. I like how easily I can add or remove midi ports and turn it off if not in use)

I do feel like when I trigger a blank clip slot to record, I can't entirely tell what is happening, but when I tap it the second time to retrigger it responds exactly as expected. I had a nice long jam and was inspired to try different things than normal given the option to use different midi input methods. But it's great having very large clip buttons that my finger can reach. I did switch back and forth between Live and the interface sometimes. When using Live I had situations where I might gradually adjust a filter and want to mute other channels at the same time and had to improvise. If I had been using the interface at that moment, I would not have had this issue at all.

All faders and buttons were the feel of an iPad in responsiveness for me which is about as good as you can get. I use a somewhat powerful HP Envy 17". The downside is that my laptop does not fold into a single tablet, so I had to open the laptop to its fullest and get nice and close haha. Had I been using something with a tablet mode, I might compromise power for useability. (Although I do like having alt tab handy for switching between programs)

The device controls are the more hairy part of the experience. It gives you every single control of a selected device when you do select it. It shows up as a list. The list is very easy to touch, but can be a little overwhelming and you have to scroll. This can be remedied by the user if they make their setup in advance and just do midi mappings. The list takes a moment to load, sometimes this happens each time you load it. Also, I am optimistic about there being a side-bar for selecting devices, but I'm not sure if there are ways to access embedded devices inside racks? In a long far-off future I could imagine them adding in device control with a more visual element to it. Perhaps start off with one or two devices like Simple Delay, so they can see how the user likes that feature.

The drum pads worked perfectly fine, I loooooooooove having direct access to quantized record. I often switch between none and 16th. In one case I lost track of where my beats were but I just set it to quarter note quantization and was back in the game. I wish there was a way to control devices while using the drum pads. There seems to be space on the left (well, it is being used by the session view/mixer), but I feel like that would be a good place to choose to have midi or device controls pop up.

I'll have to experiment more with it (have more jams ), but the best features in a nutshell are the very large and accessible multi-touch controls. Had minimal latency on my setup. And I would probably hope that progress in the device control department is in the works.

I have a friend who I am going to talk to about trying this. Also, I will be trying out the midi controls outside of Live, just out of curiosity

[hellnegative_]

this software company's site is broken. when you checkout, you will get prompted with an error about the test environment.