Ableton Forum

Hi all,

I’m working on a MIDI controller, somewhat similar to the Electra One, and I’ve been developing an Ableton Live integration over the past few months.

My current setup involves sending data from Ableton, serialized in JSON, via SYSEX to my controller. It works great for the most part, but I’m wondering if there are ways to optimize it.

One issue I’ve encountered is when I need to send all the tracks at once via SYSEX. This works fine for small projects, but with larger ones, the latency for such a big message becomes noticeable.

The same happens with scenes: after the initial load, everything runs smoothly, but that first load can take up to several seconds.

I haven’t tried compressing the messages yet, but it’s something I’m considering.

Does anyone have tips or suggestions to improve this?

Also, I’m looking for experienced remote control script developers who might have time to help with this project (paid work, of course). If that’s you or someone you know, please reach out!

Thanks a lot!

Hi, I am the developer of the Ableton Live remote script for the ElectraOne. You can find it here https://github.com/xot/ElectraOne/.

I have also observed that with Ableton Live for MacOS, sending large SysEx messages from within the remote script take a very long time to transfer (upto tens of seconds for large presets). Curiously, this is not the case for Live for Windows.

My workaround has been to use an external program (Sendmidi: https://github.com/gbevin/SendMIDI) to send such large sysex messages; see the code of the remote script for how I did this.

I consider this a hack really, and ideally would love to see Ableton send large Sysex messages fast for both Windows and MacOS.

I chose to use OSC as the transport protocol for my Knobbler control surface for iPad and Android, though the Ableton side is implemented in Max for Live. It's also using serialized JSON to communicate some things, and there is no noticeable latency. No extra program required.

https://plugins.steinkamp.us/m4l-Knobbler4

One thing on my longer-term todo list is to dig into remote scripts to see if OSC is even possible from that Python code. Seems a remote script is a better fit than an M4L device if the network communication capabilities are possible there. Happy to talk more!