Ableton Forum

Anyone use quartz composer? In what capacity? I started messing around with it and it seems like it has some potential. I'd love to hear your experience.

radialson wrote:Anyone use quartz composer? In what capacity? I started messing around with it and it seems like it has some potential. I'd love to hear your experience.

what is it? got a link?

I used to teach it in a class on putting visuals w/ sound, back before Apple had bought it (3 years ago??) and it was called Pixelshox. Mainly used it to create live performance setups, but now that you can export to quicktime there's a lot of possibilities that are opened up. Plus, anyone interested in installation work should definitely check it out... the ability to save files as screensavers and email them around is great.

Anyways, it's fun to use. Nowhere near as easy as Arkaos if you're looking to VJ, but not as hard as Jitter. A good middle ground. You can also use it to create custom VJ applications with GUIs etc. if you know Cocoa at all... I played around a little with that a few months back and had some fun with it.

itook4lefts, it comes with the Apple developer tools.

hambone1 wrote:http://www.eskatonia.net/qcblog/

quartonian mixer!!

hambone1 wrote:http://www.eskatonia.net/qcblog/

Apple has severely diminished the utility of Quartonian Mixer in version 10.4.7 of Mac OS X. It’s no longer possible for a Quartz Composer composition to load additional compositions using the “image with movie” patch. What this means is that Quartonian can now only be used to trigger quicktimes, still images or swf’s. It can’t mix quartz compositions anymore, which was one of it’s key features. Please read this page, and feel free to comment if you think this was a bad decision on Apple’s part. Because of this I am no longer developing Quartonian Mixer until I can find a solution.

bummer




anyway

http://www.quartzcompositions.com/phpBB2/index.php

itook4lefts wrote:

radialson wrote:Anyone use quartz composer? In what capacity? I started messing around with it and it seems like it has some potential. I'd love to hear your experience.

what is it? got a link?

It should be on your tiger disk(assuming you are running tiger) under the dev tools.

This stuff should blow wide open in Leopard with Core Animation.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/coreanimation.html

AVing your whole set with Live is gonna rock even more...

rbmonosylabik wrote: What this means is that Quartonian can now only be used to trigger quicktimes, still images or swf’s.

Hey! Wha..???

What flavour of Quicktime movies can Quartonian open? I've only gotten folders of stills to work.

i using QC now to create a visual MIDI interface with a Wacom tablet. QC recognizes X/Y axis, pen pressure and a bunch of other input from the pen. so basically this thing i'm building uses the left to right position as the note, the up/down position as the octave range and the pen pressure for filter cutoff (or anything else you want). what you see on the screen is just blackness, but when you apply the pen you get visuals similar that of the default OS X screensaver ("Flurry"). the octaves are represented by color ranges and the filter/pen pressure gives visual feedback by way of brightness of the "flurry". i'm toying with adding some kind of a grid so that you can see exactly where you're at in terms of notes/octaves. i plan to release it for free when (if) i ever get it completed. you can get similar results with any input device to play around with, even the mouse. i chose the Wacom due to all the input sensitivity. oh yeah, all the output values are sent to MIDI out in QC and then into Live via the internal IAC bus to Simpler, Operator, Sampler, a Rack, whatever. it's a fun little package to play around with, once you get your head around it. i'm still learning every time i use it. this guy is pretty badass with QC and i learned a lot just pulling apart his creations: http://www.zugakousaku.com/

once you start fucking with it you'll probably start getting a ton of mad scientist ideas. there really are a lot of possible creative uses for this shit.

tjwett wrote:once you start fucking with it you'll probably start getting a ton of mad scientist ideas.

"Igor, fetch the brains we have work to do"

Been using it to create an A/V program that links to ableton:- have a look...


http://www.abletonlivedj.com/forum/view ... sc&start=0

or www.youtube.com/itsthejayj

i love it and i'm just skimming the surface... i'd love to see anybody's work using QC. Its very powerful for sure. I've been using it to send LFOs into Live and to control video clips.. trying to build a lean clip trigger patch with simple effects controlled with live with it at the moment..

rbmonosylabik wrote:

hambone1 wrote:http://www.eskatonia.net/qcblog/

Apple has severely diminished the utility of Quartonian Mixer in version 10.4.7 of Mac OS X. It’s no longer possible for a Quartz Composer composition to load additional compositions using the “image with movie” patch. What this means is that Quartonian can now only be used to trigger quicktimes, still images or swf’s. It can’t mix quartz compositions anymore, which was one of it’s key features. Please read this page, and feel free to comment if you think this was a bad decision on Apple’s part. Because of this I am no longer developing Quartonian Mixer until I can find a solution.

bummer




anyway

http://www.quartzcompositions.com/phpBB2/index.php

I've been working on modding quartonian to be used with Live. While doing that, I found a set of QC macros called the Kineme plug ins (or something similar). There's a link floating around www.eskatonia.net. Among them, there's one that allows loading Quartz Compositions and outputting the image.

If you go into the "CLIP_SELECTION_ALL_LOOPS_ALL_BANKS" macro and replace the Image with Movie objects with Image with Composition, you'll be able to load compositions to that clip.



It needs more work to be able to switch between movies and compositions and to properly load a preview for compositions, but that's where I'm at right now.

rbmonosylabik wrote:

rbmonosylabik wrote:

hambone1 wrote:http://www.eskatonia.net/qcblog/

Apple has severely diminished the utility of Quartonian Mixer in version 10.4.7 of Mac OS X. It’s no longer possible for a Quartz Composer composition to load additional compositions using the “image with movie” patch. What this means is that Quartonian can now only be used to trigger quicktimes, still images or swf’s. It can’t mix quartz compositions anymore, which was one of it’s key features. Please read this page, and feel free to comment if you think this was a bad decision on Apple’s part. Because of this I am no longer developing Quartonian Mixer until I can find a solution.

bummer




anyway

http://www.quartzcompositions.com/phpBB2/index.php

I've been working on modding quartonian to be used with Live. While doing that, I found a set of QC macros called the Kineme plug ins (or something similar). There's a link floating around www.eskatonia.net. Among them, there's one that allows loading Quartz Compositions and outputting the image.

If you go into the "CLIP_SELECTION_ALL_LOOPS_ALL_BANKS" macro and replace the Image with Movie objects with Image with Composition, you'll be able to load compositions to that clip.



It needs more work to be able to switch between movies and compositions and to properly load a preview for compositions, but that's where I'm at right now.

Leopard has added a bunch of useful MIDI in and OUT features plus OSC and some things that help with networking..