Ableton Forum

why not make a notebooks touchpad able to controller-assigns?
it's strange having a ribbon controller here that i can't really use...

Wow, I finally get to help someone... kind of...

Well, I agree with you that it would be nice to have this functionality built in, but I also know that it would complicate things, and that it would be difficult to support many different touchpads (every touchpad manufacturer has their own specific drivers).

So there is a solution and it works. I used it myself a few times. The only catch is this: "At the moment only Synaptics touchpads are supported". I hope you have one of those

You need to get this "plugin" called Touchpad2Midi:
http://www.livelab.dk/touchpad2midi.php

But I could not make it work on my machine (Vista) with Ableton Live 7 directly. Maybe I didn't know how, or it just couldn't work that way. So I used this VST host (as the manual of the plugin suggests):
http://www.hermannseib.com/english/savihost.htm

And in that host application you must choose a virtual MIDI OUT port which you will get by installing this:
http://www.marblesound.com/Maple_driver.html

And then in Live you can choose (activate) the appropriate virtual MIDI IN port (click the Remote button next to it). The ports that are named the same are connected, so if in one application you send something to "port 1", you can read it in another app from "port 1".

In the manual for Touchpad2Midi you can read how to actually activate it.

You can map one parameter for enable/disable = button stuff, and two parameters = x and y, for continuous parameters.

For Enable/Disable to work: The appropriate CC number for that action you get when you touch the surface and "untouch", remove the finger from the touchpad. Be sure to put these values in the MIDI mappings: Min = 1, Max = 0 (the defaults are Min = 64, Max = 128, but that does not work).

I hope I was clear. Good luck!

thanks for your detailed reply,

that >touchpad2midi< plugin was partially the reason for that idea.

but, as you correctly said, to make it work with abletons >special< key handling, (try to type numbers into NI-plugins ...), it does simply not recompense the effort.

i stopped to call it useful if i need to install that amount of >sub-midi-appz> just to make such a simple thing work!

i try to keep my mobile audio system as simple as possible...

that´s why i made this suggestion to abletons....

I didn't know you knew about that plugin. And you are right it really is silly to have to use so many additional components/apps (in this case a total of 3).

I also noticed that I can't type in numbers in NI FM8, which is a real pain in the ... I hope they figure something out for the next version...

...there is a workaround for that keystroke problem:

hold<shift> while clicking on the little <open plugin> symbol.

that opens a dedicated window for plugin keystroke handling...

the only problem:

you need to be on mac... (somebody might know why...??!)

...and i am not...

greetz!

thanks for the tip... however I too don't have a mac...