Mackie Control and Ableton Live playhead in midi clip
Posted: Tue May 05, 2026 4:33 pm
Good evening everyone, I’m using ChatGPT because my English isn’t very good.
Working with a Mackie Control in Ableton Live’s Arrangement View is really complicated. I bought an X-Touch Compact, and Live behaves terribly when it comes to scrub and playhead management. After many desperate attempts, I finally found an ideal solution using Coyote MIDI, which allows translating MIDI messages into shortcuts.
Now, when I release one of the two scrub buttons, the note-off message triggers the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE, bringing along the Insert Marker so I can restart from that point, and I can press stop twice to restart from the beginning. I also mapped Play: when pressed, it triggers CTRL+SPACE so I can restart from the same point even in the MIDI editor.
And this is the real problem: when a MIDI clip is selected, scrubbing the timeline does not show the playhead inside the MIDI clip. You can always restart from the same point, but you need to keep the timeline open and basically guess.
However, I noticed something incredible: if you select two MIDI tracks and activate Focus, the playhead becomes visible inside the MIDI clip, making scrubbing perfect. So I wonder, why not make this work even when only a single MIDI track is selected? The function already seems to exist and works perfectly. When the MIDI clip ends, it disappears from the editor, just like in many other DAWs.
Would it be possible to integrate this function, since it essentially already exists?
Thank you very much, and sorry for the long post.
Working with a Mackie Control in Ableton Live’s Arrangement View is really complicated. I bought an X-Touch Compact, and Live behaves terribly when it comes to scrub and playhead management. After many desperate attempts, I finally found an ideal solution using Coyote MIDI, which allows translating MIDI messages into shortcuts.
Now, when I release one of the two scrub buttons, the note-off message triggers the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE, bringing along the Insert Marker so I can restart from that point, and I can press stop twice to restart from the beginning. I also mapped Play: when pressed, it triggers CTRL+SPACE so I can restart from the same point even in the MIDI editor.
And this is the real problem: when a MIDI clip is selected, scrubbing the timeline does not show the playhead inside the MIDI clip. You can always restart from the same point, but you need to keep the timeline open and basically guess.
However, I noticed something incredible: if you select two MIDI tracks and activate Focus, the playhead becomes visible inside the MIDI clip, making scrubbing perfect. So I wonder, why not make this work even when only a single MIDI track is selected? The function already seems to exist and works perfectly. When the MIDI clip ends, it disappears from the editor, just like in many other DAWs.
Would it be possible to integrate this function, since it essentially already exists?
Thank you very much, and sorry for the long post.