Eat your heart out, Ableton/Serato The Bridge.

Native Instruments’ Traktor runs four decks at once without breaking a sweat, and there are various ways of incorporating sampling, scratching, and vinyl in a live rig that are pretty easy to set up. But lately we’ve seen some unusual options to build more elaborate setups. Rane even offers a digital mixer with two USB ports so you can, among other things, get four decks in Serato by running two computers at once. (Hey, never knock the brute force method of solving a problem.) And The Bridge, introduced to great fanfare by Ableton and Serato, synchronizes the transport and basic set information between Live and Serato. That’s to say nothing of the solution of using Ms. Pinky inside Live.

But none of this compares to Ilan Kriger’s method of getting four “decks” out of Ableton Live. He simply runs four complete instances of Live — one copy of Live 5, one copy of Live 6, one copy of Live 7, and one copy of Live 8 — in order to spread them out like the four decks in Traktor. (I’m not even going to ask Ableton whether this violates your license. Maybe you could start selling Live six packs?)

He uses a Mac for the job, but a PC should work, too. (Actually, that’d be an interesting performance comparison; you’d need to make sure your ASIO drivers on PC allow multiple apps to access the same interface.)

Go ahead. Hit the comment button. Tell us that this is an insane, impractical solution to the problem. (Really? Wow, I … didn’t … expect you to react that way. I must have entirely missed that.)

And good work, Ilan. Now, Ableton engineering teams, see how important the work you do on each release is? You never know when someone will run all of the different iterations you’ve built over the past four years at one time. Got it?

I think we need to invent a new prize for Only Because It’s There ingenuity. Suggestions? What should the trophy look like?

Ilan’s setup, blogged and translated by Google from Portuguese into English
Original Português

It’s a “tutorial,” in case you want to replicate the results. (In which case, I’ll have what you’re having.)

I will say this: inter-application communication is important, even if this isn’t the most practical example.

Original video (Português):

Ms. Pinky Revised from Mastah Lee on Vimeo.

What should DJing in Ableton Live look like? How could conventional vinyl cueing and scratching be integrated with the Live environment? Serato and Ableton gave us one possible answer to that question last week with The Bridge. Their solution: use your Serato DJ set normally, and simply sync the transport of Ableton Live when the two run simultaneously.

That solution could be ideal for some users, but it falls short of what many expected, which was the ability to scratch audio elements from Live as though they were on vinyl. Scratching Live clips would seem to be the best of both worlds: you get all the live sequencing features of Live, but you can still manipulate sound as you would on a turntable.

Enter Ms. Pinky. The vinyl control system has long been a highly-precise, solid-performing alternative to better-known names. Its ace in the hole has long been open control from your own custom patches, via an external object for the graphical programming language Max/MSP. The results have ranged from custom visual performance to a vibrating chaise lounge controlled by a turntable. With Max patches now able to interact more deeply with Live through Max for Live, that opens up the chance to build your own DJ-Ableton integration.

Ms. Pinky and Max for Live user Lee Goodrich has just done that. We saw an early version of the patch last month, but a new version irons vastly expands on the integration with Live, making this a truly complete solution for digital DJing.
Post on the patch with download
Information on the update

Some of the tasty features you get:

• Set Ms. Pinky to any track and use clips in that track
• Trigger a clip as you would normally, and it cues right into Ms. Pinky for scratching (see Lee in comments for more, but do note that the catch is that Ms Pinky actually loads the original file, because clips in Live don’t yet provide access to their playhead)
• Trigger different sequences of audio clips using a pattern contained in a MIDI clip (essentially automated cueing)
• Record clips using Live’s recording facility
• Scratch away with control vinyl

In relative mode, you can proceed directly to the beginning of the next clip without back-cueing.

The net result of all of this: Ms. Pinky acts like a scratch-anything device you can drop right into your existing Live set. With clever use of sampling and re-sampling, that opens up integration with any synths or external audio sources, not just audio clips.

Ironically, this is much closer to what I had predicted the Serato – Ableton collaboration would resemble.

Lee shares some comments about his experience:

I understand the concern people have about the one big caveat of Max For Live programming (You gotta pay to play, and no free runtime limits potential casual users), but honestly I think Max for Live is a slick enough product to overcome this. Making Max For Live patches has been the most fun programming I’ve ever had, and it is amazing how much you can do and how easy it is to do it. If other programmers are having as much fun as I am, then the bevy of awesome patches that come out of this product will end up being worth paying $300 at the door.

Perhaps the only other thing I’d like to say is that I’m not actually affiliated with Ms. Pinky at all, just another customer who wanted some functionality and due to the versatility of the software was able to extend it. So big thanks to Down Low Pinkstah and whoever else has worked on Ms. Pinky to make it so easily extensible.

Thanks, Lee! It’ll be interesting to see where else this may lead.

If you start using this in your sets, let us know – and get some photos / videos / mixes / whatever.

Oh, yeah, and I want to see a vibrating chaise lounge interface inside Ableton, too.

http://www.mspinky.com/

There’s long been a massive gap in technique, capabilities, and workflow between DJ tools and performance, music production, and live electronics or live PA. Ableton Live’s original hook was that it
bridged performance instrument and arrangement tool. Now, in a product literally called The Bridge, we get Ableton’s and Serato’s first take on how to blend DJing and arrangement/electronic performance. It’s certainly not going to be the last word on the subject. On CDM in the past, we’ve discussed inserting DJ applications in Live, and using vinyl to scratch video (including with Serato’s own VIDEO-SL). The advent of Max for Live means new applications, like Ms. Pinky-powered virtual vinyl devices inside Live. But The Bridge has turned out to be something different, as I discussed Thursday.

And surprise: there’s even some relevance to Ableton Live users who might not normally ponder Serato, even if only to take advantage of improved transport operation in Live itself.

We’ve gotten to speak to Ableton and Serato representatives; see the short video of Ableton’s Dennis DeSantis and Ableton’s official overview of the tool, as shot by intrepid CDM NAMM contributor Neil Bufkin. Based on additional conversations, here’s what we know.

Ableton & Serato @ NAMM 2010 – The Bridge from Neil Bufkin on Vimeo.

Serato to Ableton

Q. What’s this “mix tape” feature about?

A. That’s the easiest to explain, most immediate feature of The Bridge — and it’s the one that’s likely to be appealing to Serato users immediately. You can now export mixes produced in Serato directly into Ableton’s native ALS format.

Q. Wait – does that mean I need Serato ITCH or Scratch Live hardware controllers in order to record my crossfades?

A. Yes. Turntablists aren’t entirely left out, though: the Rane TTM 57SL and the newly-announced TTM-68 performance mixers do record mix automation. And you’ll still have other automation data with which to work, so this is still likely to be useful to everyone, even if there’s some level of variability between the different versions. (If that’s of interest, we can follow up more later.)

Ableton’s Jesse Terry confirms to CDM: “Audio files are laid out in Live’s arrangement on a timeline, according to when they are loaded on a deck in Scratch Live or ITCH. These are new audio files, to deal with scratching, etc, but they are named accordingly.”

Ableton has also posted more information on mixtapes and specific hardware on their Mixtape tour.

Q. CDM said ALS is now an XML-based format – really? When did that happen?

A. Yes, really. Live switched to an XML format with Live 8.1. In fact, save any of your Live sets in Live 8.1.x or later, and all the information about clips, channels, presets, and arrangements winds up in an open, standard format. That’s something I hope to look at more soon, because it could lead to some interesting hacks and power tools. But the reason it’s relevant here is that you can likely thank the Serato and Cycling ‘74 (Max for Live) collaborations for making this a necessity – even as this has potential advantages well beyond The Bridge.

Ableton “Inside” Serato

Q. I see clips from Live Session View in Serato. But that’s just audio clips, right? What about MIDI patterns, instruments, effects, plug-ins?

A. Ableton Live is running in the background. The Bridge requires both a full copy of Live and a full copy of Serato (Scratch Live or ITCH) for a reason: the real, full-blown Live runs at the same time as Serato does. That means everything you can do with Live normally, you can do with Serato, Live, and The Bridge: you can trigger MIDI patterns, use Live’s internal Devices like Drum Racks and Grain Delay, run third-party plug-in instruments and effects, and even – if you’re feeling especially crazy – Max for Live devices.

Q. Wait – but I can do all those things in Live now, and I still even a crossfader. So why wouldn’t I just DJ with Live and skip all of this additional complexity?

A. Answer: you might decide to do just that, especially if you’re a seasoned Live user. On the other hand, Serato DJs can get a chance to infuse more interactive performance bits into their performance easily, and they have manual control over transport tempo and timing. And if you split your time between Live and Serato – which some DJ/performers certainly do – this could mean being able to move from one to the other seamlessly rather than having to switch apps. But yes, of course: this isn’t going to be the right solution for everyone, even those looking to combine Live with DJing. We’ll be looking at other options, too.

Q. What does the integration itself do?

A. What you see:

• A limited window on Session View: You can see 4, 5, or 8 scenes, and 4, 6 or 8 tracks, clip color and status (just as in Session View), track controls, and two sends. You also get effect device controls and two sends.
• Live’s tempo
• Indicators for bars and beats, overlaid atop your waveform views in Serato, so it’s easy to see how the two are meshing (or not)
• A sync player, which Ableton’s Jesse describes as being useful “for adding embellishing songs, in case you’d like to assign Ableton Live’s sync to a song on one of your decks, with out using up that deck with a Live Set.”
• DJ-style Looping of Ableton Live’s Transport — that is, the entire transport for the entire set, not just an individual clip. “This is a big one,” says Jesse, “as previously Ableton Live users weren’t able to loop like this, i.e. Do 16th note looping, and when you exit the loop, you end up back on the ‘one.’”

What you can do:

• Control Live’s transport: play and stop with Serato as if Live itself is another deck.
• Sync Live and Serato easily, without having to worry about which you load first.
• Change tempo in Live.
• Nudge forward and backward (which should make for some nice beat syncopation effects with the pairing).
• Use ITCH or virtual vinyl to control the Live transport.

What you can’t do — yet:

• There’s no reverse audio recording of the output of Live — there’s no way to route audio from Live into Serato, period. So –
• You can NOT scratch or reverse Live’s audio as if it were another deck (yet; of course, it’d be nice to see this in a future release).

(”Yet” is the operative word, as I expect The Bridge may add additional features over time.)

Q. If I can’t scratch Live, I’m out.

A. That’s a valid response. On the other hand, there’s some powerful potential here for adding instruments, effects, and clips, particularly if you keep it simple and balance what’s in Live with what’s in Serato. I’m sure some DJ will make great use of this, even if it won’t be for everyone.

Q. Won’t adding plug-ins interfere with the stability of Serato?

A. That’s worth considering. Aside from stability problems or crashes, adding a lot of plug-ins could increase resource consumption on your computer, add more musical complexity that you have to control, and even – in the case of certain plug-ins that require latency compensation – impact your timing. So Serato users, you’ll want to be really careful and test thoroughly before gigging with a massive Serato-Live set.

Q. How do Serato and Live output to your audio interface, if they’re not routing audio into one another? Can they share an audio output? Might some people just route audio separate for independent mixing and busing via a mixer?

A. That’s a good question, and the short answer is, I don’t know. I turned to Ableton for an answer, but it seems like we may have to wait for more details. Jesse Terry advises us to “stay tuned, we are aware of the complications here and are working to find a simple solution for the end user.”

Q. How do I trigger clips in Live from the Serato interface? Can I use ITCH controllers?

A. Right now, there aren’t ITCH or Scratch Live controllers with controls dedicated for Live, though presumably such hardware could appear in the future. So you can use ITCH or Scratch Live to control the Live transport, and you can see visual feedback in the Serato interface as far as what’s happening in Live, but that’s about it. While we wait to see if new hardware combines these functions, though, you can use an ITCH or Scratch Live controller for Serato and any MIDI controller for Live, including devices like the APC40, Launchpad, a monome, a nanoKONTROL – whatever.

Q. What enables the transport sync between the two programs? Why not just use ReWire?

A. Actually, early prototypes of The Bridge did use ReWire. But ReWire has some limitations, like the inability of a client to use plug-ins or record audio (at least according to the spec), and ultimately people I talked to at both Serato and Ableton felt it wasn’t the right tool for this job. “Serato and Ableton created an entirely new interapplication communication protocol to make the timing as tight as possible,” says Ableton’s Jesse.

Q. Will we get to use this transport protocol for anything other than Serato and Ableton, if it works so well?

A. Maybe. Right now, it’s a proprietary sync spec that works only with these two tools. This is normally where I give my “open standard” speech, but I think it’d be too early to judge whether the solution Ableton and Serato found would even be useful with anything else. It does raise questions for other developers, though, about what sorts of general solutions might work. (Case in point: I recently saw a demo synchronizing 3D rendering, video, and animation tool Blender with the DAW Ardour, all using free software on Linux to do something that’s not currently possible with expensive proprietary solution. What made it tick? A free, open technology called JACK, which does transport interconnects as well as audio and MIDI.)

Side note: I’ve heard from Live users making insanely intensive use of synchronization and timing that they’re finding sync performance is improved under 8.1.1 builds and later. There are a lot of variables in sync, but it’s interesting anecdotal evidence, at least, and The Bridge did require some under-the-hood work on Live’s timing – always a good thing.

The Bridge – Availability, Pricing

Q. What will this cost?

A. So long as you own a copy of Live 8 or Live Suite, plus a copy of Serato, The Bridge is free; there’s no add-on cost if you own both products as there was with Max for Live. (Note that LE/Lite/Starter editions of Live would not quality, and would require an upgrade to the full version.)

Q. Is there a release date?

A. No release date has been announced yet.

Q. Is it working now?

A. Yes, actually – The Bridge is up and functioning with current builds of Live; it’s just not publicly available yet.

Q. Will the release of The Bridge be impacted by the decision Ableton made to delay new releases in order to focus on fixing bugs and reliability?

A. Yes and no. Ableton says they’re not releasing any new versions until they’re again fully satisfied with quality. So that will delay The Bridge. On the other hand, The Bridge is working, so while the release is delayed, The Bridge is coming – and my money says it shouldn’t be too far off.

By the way, the work done on The Bridge may have an impact in the opposite direction. “The work being done for the Bridge helps tighten up Live’s transport for all Live users,” says Jesse. And given how closely a lot of you rely on that transport, that’s good news.

I think that should cover it for now. This is the first-generation product, and it’s not even out yet. But we’ll be sure to cover more developments as they arise, and as we get closer to the release of The Bridge.

Lastly, here’s Ableton’s current video. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t show is video footage of the software in action, just some DJ celebrities talking about how excited they are. (”It’ll change lunchmeat forever!” “It’ll make your face melt!”) Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I’m guessing you’d like to see the tool; stay tuned.

And yes, if none of this is floating your boat, and your face isn’t melting, I’m working on showing more of what Ms. Pinky can do with Max for Live. Having more choices is always good; it means you can find the best choice for you.

Live maker Ableton and DJ and virtual vinyl developer Serato today announced the results of their partnership. First off, this isn’t what many of us originally speculated: it’s not a DJ deck inside Live. Instead, the collaboration seeks to bridge (ahem) the gap between the way DJs perform and the way Live users perform. The result focuses on the way a performance set is assembled in the two paradigms, an attempt to guide the flow of music between the two programs. Here’s how it works.

Bring Serato “mixtapes” into Ableton Live: Save a DJ mix – called a “mix tape” – in a Serato product, and export it to Live, and what you get is all of your edits in a form that can be further manipulated in Live. Waveforms and automation data from your DJ session, however they’re manipulated and transcribed by the Serato software, appear in Live.

Put the Ableton Live Session View “inside” Serato: Here’s where things get in interesting. Rather than put Serato inside Live, we’re getting Live inside Serato – after a fashion. Ableton Live runs in the background. Integrated into the Serato interface (as seen at the screenshot at top) are all your Session View clips from your Live Set. Serato’s control – via audio input from vinyl or CDJs, or an ITCH control surface – manipulates the entire transport of the Live set.

Unknown: Turntablists are probably wondering, can they scratch Live? How much are those Live clips able to do? Do they behave as they do in Live? (As far as I know, yes – Live is, after all, running in the background and appears to have its normal capabilities.) I’ll work on these questions with Ableton and have an update by tomorrow.

ITCH: Yes, you can use controllers that support Serato’s ITCH, not just vinyl or CDJs, in order to control the transport of your imported Live set.

Pricing: Free. Own Serato Live/ITCH and Ableton Live (full version or Suite)? The Bridge costs you nothing. (Yes, this seems to be a departure from the arrangement from Max for Live.)

Availability: “No release date has been set yet.”

Naturally, all of this begs the question: do you really want to do this? And I expect that question is about to get turned over and inside out all over comments here on CDM and around the Web. It’ll naturally depend a lot on who you are.

Taking Serato sets into Live is clearly great for Serato users. It means you can get a head start on assembling an arrangement just by DJing, or alternatively, that you have the ability to use Live as a way of editing your Serato set. (Now, again, this appears to be a proprietary format – but that raises an interesting point. Ableton now uses an open XML format, meaning you could also presumably deconstruct this new Serato export and enable it to be used somewhere else, whether intended or not. But I digress.)

It’s the more ambitious reverse direction that’s both the most interesting and the most potentially controversial. After all, if you’re using Session View inside of Serato, why not just use Session View? Will it be more useful to put Live inside the virtual vinyl environment than the virtual vinyl inside Live? (If it turns out you favor the latter, you have other options – not least the recent evolution of Max for Live patches for Ms. Pinky. More on that in coming days.)

Side note: check out the VIDEO-SL integration. That makes this all even more interesting as an a/v, virtual vinyl environment; see our ongoing coverage of VIDEO-SL and other vinyl visualism for Create Digital Motion.

I’m not a turntablist, though, so I think the real question is what their take on this is. And kudos to Serato and Ableton for taking the gutsy route here as far as combining these products. We’ll get a closer look soon, and I’m curious to hear the reactions – however impassioned they may be. (On your mark … set … comment. Oh, boy.)

http://www.ableton.com/thebridge
http://www.serato.com/thebridge

It’s round, it’s mechanically-resistant, it’s tangible, it supports multi-touch and gestures. Yep – it’s the turntable, and outdoing it would mean reinventing the wheel, literally. And so it is that more than a few Ableton fans have wondered how they might work vinyl into their software axe of choice.

Ableton and digital vinyl vendor Serato have announced they’re doing “something,” and then announced at the beginning of October that an announcement would be announced on January 14, 2010 at NAMM. Oh, and they said it will “unleash your creativity,” which sounds good. (It’s better than, say, “Ableton and Serato’s creative partnership will unleash two dozen angry badgers,” or “if you own Ableton Live, what we will say in 2010 is that we will unleash an unspeakable, nameless evil, known only to the ancients, which shall bring about the endtimes.”)

Here’s the surprise – you likely won’t have to wait for Serato to get integrated digital vinyl control. It’s already working with Ms. Pinky, and that means more choice, more DIY possibilities, and a broader variety of ways to integrate turntables and Live.

You see, there’s this little thing called Max for Live, which allows the use of Max patches inside Live as seamless instruments and effects. And one of the best – if least-known – vinyl control systems out there has long featured Max integration: Ms. Pinky. People have already made use of VST plug-in integration, but because Max for Live also connects to the Live API for control of Live itself, the functionality of the two can be expanded.

Via our friend Luthier.Lab, we get a first look at the Ms. Pinky plug-in. And this should be just the beginning, as Ms. Pinky and its Max/MSP support could be a great construction kit for building your own solution – something that may not be possible with Serato.

Ms.PinkyforLive [Luthier.Lab - en Español]
Google Translate (which has some very funny ideas about how to translate Spanish)
Discussion on the Ms. Pinky forum

While you ponder the possibilities, it’s time for a video from Daito Manabe demonstrating that not all turntablists sound quite the same.

David Zicarelli has announced that Cycling ‘74 is discontinuing Max/MSP Pluggo-based products, meaning the company will no longer develop Pluggo, Mode, Hipno, or UpMix. More significantly, this means an end to the use of Max/MSP as a way of developing plug-ins; David writes that there will be “no further development on … their supporting technology.” It’s the supporting technology that Max patchers have relied upon to make their own instruments and effects for VST/AU/RTAS Mac and Windows hosts, and its demise to me is the real news here for the Max community.

The article touts the upcoming availability of Max for Live as an alternative. Now, I think Max for Live is a very exciting technology – I’m finally editing some videos and discussion with Jeremy Bernstein, so we’ll have a preview next week. The flipside is:

• Less compatibility. Ableton Live is just one host. Pluggo support RTAS, VST, and AU on Mac and Windows, so you could use your Max patches as plug-ins in tools like Logic or FL Studio, too. (Ultimately, having to figure out how to support all those things was part of Pluggo’s demise, but the desire to do so still holds.)
• No free runtime. Cycling ‘74 has been clear in that Max for Live will be a paid product. So, whereas a developer could create a Pluggo plug-in with Max/MSP and deploy it for free use anywhere, now you have to assume that the person using your plug-in will buy both Live and (separately) Max for Live.

For an example of why the Pluggo technology has been important, see examples like Ms. Pinky’s Wrecked System (though I appreciate the irony of that screenshot being Ableton).

Max for Live is awesome, it just isn’t Pluggo exactly – for better and for worse. The good news is, some of the oddball Pluggo instruments and effects will be available for Max for Live when it comes out, and existing owners will get that at a discount. But you might want to keep an old Mac or PC around running Max 4 and some of the strange plug-ins in the Pluggo collection.

Pluggo Technology Moves to Max for Live

Thanks to Jonathan Bailey and Nick Inhofe for sending this in.

The upshot to me is that Max/MSP is no longer such a viable development environment for effects and instruments, if you want any kind of wider consumption of what you’re making. It can be, at the same time, an utterly brilliant environment for yourself and for other people working with Max and Live. But on the other hand, part of the reason this may not be earth-shaking news is that there are alternatives – see below.

That’s not to argue with the fact that the Max + Ableton Live combination will rock and be a big deal – no argument there.

So, I actually think it may be a good thing for Max to have this focus, especially because, if you do want to support other hosts, there’s no reason to limit yourself to Max.

Open Source and Commercial Flavors

What I think is happening – perhaps naturally so – is a differentiation between the proprietary and open paths. If you choose the commercial Max/MSP – Max for Live – Ableton Live route, you get a really unparalleled level of UI polish and usability, and extraordinary integration between your Max creations and the host (Live).

The open-source altnerative now increasingly offers greater compatibility and flexibility. We’ve seen Max’s open source cousin Pure Data (Pd) run as the back end to a commercial game (Spore), on Linux on PDAs and old iPods, and as the back end to commercial iPhone apps.This is enabled by the fact that Pd is open source and community-supported, just as the ability to interoperate more deeply with Ableton Live was enabled by a commercial development process. (ChucK has also shown up powering successful mobile apps, like Smule’s Ocarina.)

That’s not to say one route is better than the other. On the contrary, it’s important to look at these two choices side by side because they’re different, and differently suited to particular situations.

And focus can be a good thing. In the case of Cycling ‘74, the decision was that plug-in support was no longer practical:

…we have had to face the fact that it is simply not cost-effective to support three different plug-in specifications on two different platforms, particularly given the increasing absence of standardization of host platforms we have observed over the past several years. Supporting our Max/MSP-based plug-in technology involves trying to make the entire Max environment run inside another host application. This was never a simple matter to begin with, and it has only grown more challenging with time.

It may indeed not make sense for Cycling to continue to provide this support. But it could be possible for others to support that – and, I hope, for us to someday have a better cross-platform plug-in standard, though that’s another discussion.

Alternative Plug-in Development Tools

There are other tools that are focused on plug-in development, and depending on your needs, they could fill the void left by Pluggo.

Here are just a few:

pdvst, free + open source, Windows

You know how Cycling is talking about how they have to run Max inside the host? That’s what this does for Pd. It looks like binarines are only available for Windows, but I see no reason this couldn’t be ported to other OSes, too. (I also remember some sort of solution for making LADSPA plug-ins with Pd, but maybe I just dreamed that.) I gave it a shot, and it’s actually quite nice.

Plogue Bidule, US$75, Mac + Windows

Plogue may actually come out on top as a cross-platform, commercial tool for building VST and AU plug-ins – only Reaktor here does that, and Plogue is quite a lot cheaper. ReWire works, too. That means Bidule will work with any host you like – even Reason – instead of just Live. If you only use Live, that may not matter, but if you use anything else … well, you get the point.

See our previous story: Plogue Bidule Modular Music App: Get Started, Meet the Creators

SuperColliderAU, free + open source, Mac

For people using the elegant sound coding language SuperCollider, you can now turn your creations into Audio Units, with full OSC control retained. Again, it’s quite easy to do.

SynthMaker, US$133-255, Windows

SynthMaker is tightly focused on instrument and effect creation, more narrowly-so than Max but as a result very powerful for the task. Also, if the Max for Live / Ableton combination doesn’t do it for you, SynthMaker is now included with FL Studio. It’s Windows-only, but you can develop plug-ins not only for FL but any Windows host.

SynthEdit, US$50 (shareware trial available), Windows

The gold standard of DIY plug-in creation, SynthEdit is actually sometimes notorious for its popularity (as in, “crappy SynthEdit plug-in). But don’t let that dissuade you: this is a powerful environment for making your own VSTs, and some truly brilliant instruments and effects have been created in it. There’s also some extensive documentation.

SonicBirth, free + open source, Mac

Why SonicBirth isn’t being widely used is really beyond me – maybe the death of Pluggo will wake people up to its potential. It’s a graphical patching environment for MIDI, audio, and instrument creation, it’s quite elegant to use, and it’s utterly free. The only bad news is, the open source version or promised commercial successor seem not to have gotten much development love lately.

Reaktor, $399 street (academic discount), Mac/Windows

Reaktor has the same limitation Max for Live does in that there’s no free runtime. But a Reaktor patch can run – and be edited live – inside any Mac or Windows host.

csLADSPA, free + open source, cross-platform

Still can’t figure out what this new-fangled Max thing is about when your CSound is working just fine? csLADSPA lets you write your own instrument and effects plug-ins in CSound and run them on any LADSPA host (it even works on Windows). Geeky, yes, but as I think about it, that’s pretty cool.

This is not an attempt to be a complete round-up, so anything I’ve left out, do let us know. I’m particularly interested to know how, say, SuperCollider or Pd users could target Mac, Windows, and Linux hosts.

Not Using Plug-ins

There is one … other alternative. Plug-ins have their uses, but everything Cycling is saying about the challenge of using them is absolutely true.

Ultimately, it’s worth thinking about why you’re using a plug-in. Do you just need to route audio or control from one place to another? Do you just want your strange, DIY step sequencer to sync with a track?

ReWire is one alternative, and Max continues to support ReWire.

But you can also use technology like JACK to route audio and (on Linux) sync and MIDI from place to place. In fact, while there are tools for creating your own LADSPA plug-ins on Linux, I don’t know anyone using them for this very reason – the support for jacking audio, sync, and control from place to place is so good, you can simply start your different music tools and you may not care that they’re not plug-ins.

Your Thoughts?

Okay, that story wound up being quite a bit longer than I had expected, but that’s the point – you have lots of alternatives. I’m curious to what you DIYers and patchers out there are imagining you’ll be spending your time doing over the coming months, whether it’s all Csound or all Max for Live.

Serato announced yesterday that they’ll be joining Ableton in a “creative partnership.” It’s not too hard to parse what this means from the announcement, which notes that Ableton Live’s strength is production and real-time remixing and beats, and Serato Scratch Live is about digital vinyl control, library management, and scratching. (Or, to say it even more simply: Serato is built around digital vinyl metaphors, and Live around remixable digital clips.)

Serato and Ableton announce a creative partnership [Serato News]
Ableton and Serato to work together [musicradar.com]

In fact, Ableton CEO Gerhard Behles spells out what this will mean fairly explicitly:

“Ableton and Serato take different approaches to modern musical performance”

Okay, so, Ableton fans worried that Live is going to just become a DJ tool, or Serato lovers who don’t want Scratch Live assimilated into Ableton, fear not.

Ableton has never had an answer for the DJ who wants vinyl control, and rather than try to emulate what Serato do so well, we simply make sure that our products work well together.

Got that? We hear DJs regularly complain about Ableton Live, that there’s not proper scratching control over waveforms, that you can’t see more than one audio waveform (”deck”) at one time, that it lacks vinyl control, and so on. But obviously, at least some of those metaphors don’t jive terribly well with Live’s clean, signature interface, which wasn’t built to do these things in a traditional way.

Sounds to me like the most likely result is some kind of Serato deck that runs inside Ableton. I feel safe in speculating about this because I haven’t heard anything from Ableton about this. And there’s cause for that, as well, as many Ableton Live users do Live PA, laptop sets with Live, and then turn elsewhere (often to Serato, if not to rival Traktor) for more conventional DJ sets. Regardless, those of you who could care less about conventional DJ features are likely to find this comforting news: Ableton probably isn’t going to muck around with your software to graft them in.

I think this could amp up the NI – Ableton rivalry; Native’s DJ division has been further beefing up their Traktor Scratch options. This comes right on the heels of NI’s own Traktor Scratch Pro offerings, but since I’ll be in Berlin by this time tomorrow and that’s a released product, I expect to talk to NI directly about that. (Of course, I’m horribly biased in that I’d personally rather hear sets with people doing strange things with Live and Reaktor, but that’s me.)

That said, clearly only Serato and not Native could partnership with Ableton, because Serato had “Live” in the name of their product. (Perhaps that was an early sign of Ableton envy?)

All of this probably reminds some of you of another strategic Ableton partnership, with Cycling ‘74, makers of Max/MSP. When announced some time ago, the expectation was that some product would come of that. We haven’t seen that product yet, but sometimes these relationships take time to bear fruit. I wonder.

Incidentally, what gets us most excited about Serato round these parts? Visual vinyl. See the Create Digital Motion hands-on review.

Updated: I should add, it is possible to add DJ capabilities to Live now by using a DJ host that functions in plug-in mode, as a couple of commenters note. Pinko’s Max/MSP-based “Pinky Pluggo” is one option; another is Image Line’s Deckadance. Both allow you to do vinyl control, too; Deckadance will work with any controller. I’m particularly fond of Deckadance’s absurd-sounding effects, which I think could add the sort of digital grunge to a DJ set or loop that will appeal to a lot of the Ableton-using crowd. And these sorts of tools are shipping now.

But of course, we really have no idea what it is exactly that Ableton and Serato are planning, whether it’ll be a new Live instrument or some other form of integration.

Scratching began as a practical means by which DJs could cue records. (So say originators like Grandmaster Flash; if you’re interested in the history, check out the fantastic documentary Scratch — trailer above.) But something about the gesture, the mechanical feeling of scratching, and all that history has made the turntable compelling as a controller. It’s even taught as an instrument at Berklee.

So, what if you want to scratch for purposes other than conventional DJing?

Getting at Timecode

Digital vinyl systems like Serato Scratch LIVE and Native Instruments Traktor Scratch are designed for DJs. Part of the whole advantage is that you get an integrated system with vinyl, decoding capability, audio interfacing with the computer, and software for DJ functions. If you want to take the turntable to other frontiers, you have to find a way to get the timecode data from the vinyl directly and do something different with it, like control an instrument or scratch visuals. (Only recently did a big-name, mainstream DVS, Serato, take on visuals, as seen on Create Digital Motion, and even then it makes some assumptions about what you want to do.)

We’ve seen a few examples of how to do this:

• Ammobox, an open-sourced, free Reaktor ensemble from Nathan Ramella, breaks the rules of how timecode decoding is supposed to work in a wonderful way, enabling something he calls "polyphonic scratching." Since it sends MIDI, you can control other stuff with it, and since it’s built in Reaktor, you can customize the workings of the ensemble or integrate it into your own creations.
• Ms. Pinky vinyl comes with a Max/MSP external for use in patches. The object also works with Torq vinyl; see comments. And talk about non-conventional DJing: the tech has produced art installations made with turntables in tree trunks and turntable-controller vibrating furniture, pictured top right. (Does anyone know if it’s possible to port the Ms. Pinky object to Pd as well as Max?)
• xwax is an open-source, Linux-based vinyl emulation software. Unlike the other two options here, it is actually intended for emulating digital vinyl systems on Mac and Windows; there are even open source drivers for Rane and Stanton audio interfaces. But to many of us, that isn’t nearly as interesting as doing something different with the vinyl.

A New External for Digital Vinyl in Max, Pd

Niklas Klügel writes to let us know he has a new alternative. He’s done a "quick hack" of wrapping the timecode-decoding code in xwax for Max/MSP and Max’s open-source cousin, Pure Data (Pd), for support on Mac, Windows, and (Pd only) Linux. The ability to support both Max and Pd comes from a helpful cross-platform development layer for C++ programmers called flext.

The result: you’ve got an object you can use in your Max and Pd patches that supports Serato (2nd edition) and Traktor Scratch vinyl. You get output for pitch and relative position.

Decoding timecode is a non-trivial problem in a number of ways, so there are some glitches — Niklas reports some trouble determining the start point of a record. (He explains, "I do not exactly know whether all vinyls start with the same timecode; I could have hardcoded it into the application (taking that from the one I have) but on the other hand you have a tad more freedom regarding the resolution of the positioning.")

But since part of the idea is to change the way the vinyl works, that may be okay. And if you do start the record at the beginning to get the start point, absolute-style positioning seems to work, as well. Niklas says the idea of this, far from emulating existing DJ systems, was to make an expressive controller. He writes:

I wrote the external to have control over the pitch and stretching/interpolation of samples to do glitchy sounds using the turntables while having somehow accurate instant control. It works surprisingly well. It’s somehow funny to see/hear when simple things turn out to be very expressive – musically.

This is a first hack, not an official solution, so part of why I bring it up is I hope the CDM Army will go out and test the thing, particularly on the just-released Max 5. Coders, you may want to have a look at xwax’s timecoder, too; it apparently works very well, and fits sveltely in about 600 lines of code.

vinylcontrol~

But is it Legal?

A number of readers wondered about the implications of an announcement this week that Native Instruments had settled a patent dispute and would officially acknowledge and license N2IT’s vinyl technology. (N2IT originated the FinalScratch digital vinyl system, later marketed by Stanton with software from Native Instruments.) Will N2IT decide to protect its patent with open source projects like xwax, or competing vinyl systems like Serato Scratch LIVE? Honestly, I don’t know, and anyone who does know is unlikely to say anything given the possibility of ongoing legal action. N2IT did sue Native Instruments, even though NI has built its current Traktor Scratch on a new codebase and with a different system for vinyl timecode, so I would suspect it’s possible someone like Serato could wind up with a case of their own.

The difference with xwax and Ammobox, however, is that these systems are simply decoding information already printed on the vinyl. vinylcontrol~ and Ammobox just do the decoding, so they really aren’t complete digital vinyl systems — part of what I find appealing, for different kinds of projects. With other projects that decode vinyl (PCDJ and Deckadance, for instance), my guess would be that decoding solutions are relatively safe. But I’m not a patent lawyer, and I don’t know what N2IT is planning.

Go Ahead, Touch It

In the meantime, though, what’s exciting here is to create new projects that do things with vinyl that haven’t been done before. After all, experimentation and rule-breaking (don’t touch the records!) is how scratching got started in the first place.

Vibrating furniture, anyone?

This November, digital vinyl as we now know it will turn 10 years old. This setup is pretty simple in theory: instead of music, put encoded timecode on a record, then decode that timecode to provide information about where the record is in relationship to the needle. The idea is basic enough that, patent or no patent, it was inevitable that various developers would pursue the technique (and the very difficult work of implementation). Simulate the effect of scratching or needle dropping on a computer, and you’ve got virtual DJing, as found in products from Serato, Stanton, Native Instruments, Ms. Pinky, and others.

And as of Friday, it seems that the ongoing saga of a dispute over digital vinyl, beginning with the 2006 "divorce" of digital DJ titans Stanton Electronics and Native Instruments, may be over. NI released a statement Friday saying they had not only settled a US civil action patent case over their use of digital vinyl in Traktor Scratch, but had agreed to license the technology from N2IT Holdings, the US patent owners for digital DJing.

Apologies for the cat photo cliche, but … this involves patent law. We’d better have something cute and furry around to get through it.

The conclusion — the two have settled, Traktor Scratch is licensed per-use from N2IT, and N2IT’s patents are valid:

Native Instruments acknowledges the validity of patents held by N2IT, and has now fully licensed their usage worldwide for its TRAKTOR SCRATCH digital DJ system and related products.

The patents held by N2IT relate to general principles of digital music playback using time-code records, which are being utilized in TRAKTOR SCRATCH as well as in other manufacturers’ digital DJ systems with time-code control.

Acknowledging the validity of N2IT’s patents is actually pretty sweeping. You can read N2IT’s primary patent on Google Patent Search. The key words here are that N2IT patented the basic idea of using a turntable with encoded timecode on it for DJing. Theoretically, that could open up other digital DJ products to patent liability — keeping in mind that NI is a special case, because it was a development partner on N2IT’s FinalScratch product and was familiar with the technology.

How We Got Here: A FinalScratch History Timeline

I’m neither a patent lawyer nor a historian of digital DJ technology, so I quickly get out of my depth with the twists and turns this plot has taken. But I can offer at least a basic timeline of what’s happened, which puts today’s digital DJing in some context — albeit a somewhat strange context.

It goes something like this:

1. Revolutionizing Digital DJing — on BeOS (Doh!)

November 19, 1998: N2IT announces FinalScratch — for BeOS. [See Harmony Central, 1998] They even show off a working prototype at the COMDEX computer convention in Vegas. The product is developed with input from Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva, who become its first users. (Incidentally, that’s why NI made a big deal of Hawtin switching to FinalScratch, and why Hawtin claims to have been on the cutting edge of digital DJing. At least in 1998, he certainly was, though you could argue the point now if you like. The choice of Be seems strange, but recall that under two years earlier, an Apple acquisition of Be Inc. had still seemed possible — until Amelio decided to go with Steve Jobs’ NeXT Inc. instead. And BeOS’ unique audio system gives it exceptionally-reliable, low-latency performance that could put today’s Windows and Mac OS X to shame.

Gustavo Lanzas aka Audioelectronic was there in the early days, as he describes on the Ableton forum:

Final Scratch was developed by a small Amsterdam-based 2-person company called N2IT in 1997-1998. The two creators were active in the rave/club scene, and had experience djing.

I was hired in 1998 [think this actually mean 1999 -Ed.] to go to Vegas and demo the very first system seen in the US at a BeOS event at the Treasure Island Ballroom. Here is a link to an archive of the event:

http://www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/events/NAB_party.html

The hardware at the time was a hand-soldered prototype in an open aluminum project enclosure. The software it controlled was the BeOS media player. You could open multiple instances, and control whichever one was in front. Very rough, very primitive, but it worked more or less the same as it did now. There were exactly 2 prototypes, and no one had invested 2 million dollars into the company. Smile

Here’s a link to an early press release (I don’t think the product actually existed as such at this date):

http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/1998/FinalScratch.html

I had worked with Timothy Self, then audio evangelist for BeOS, prior to this at Opcode Systems, makers of Studio Vision & several top-notch midi interfaces.

It looks to me like N2IT actually did show something at the 1998 COMDEX, because the Be folks gave them award and have a photo.

The Version 1.0 release comes out on a modified version of Debian Linux as well as BeOS. (The 1.0 software doesn’t seem to have been released until 2000.) Among early Linux adopters: Josh Wink.

2. N2IT to Stanton

[Date needed]: Stanton Magnetics buys FinalScratch from N2IT. I can’t find a date, which I assume means this wasn’t a publicly-announced acquisition. (And given the fact that the software was primitive and ran on Linux and BeOS, that’s not a huge surprise.) I’m also a bit unclear on the history of N2IT Holdings, though I’m gathering these exist for the purposes of retaining US patent rights.

January 2002: Bearing the Stanton name, the first complete commercial FinalScratch product comes to market at winter NAMM, for BeOS and Linux.

March 2003: Stanton and N2IT release Linux source code to the ScratchAmp driver — but note this only covers the audio interface, which is relatively meaningless; the real value is the timecode on the vinyl.

3. Digital DJing on the Mac, Windows

May 8, 2003: Version 1.1 of FinalScratch began the collaboration between Stanton and N2IT. It’s more like what we now know: Mac compatibility, and (courtesy Native Instruments) more usable DJ software. NI’s Traktor FinalScratch product even included a Linux version, though, for anyone who thinks NI has never done Linux development.

Native Instruments is really the ingredient that takes FinalScratch mainstream. They later port to Windows as well as Mac OS X.

4. Digital DJ Divorce

Late 2006: Native Instruments and Stanton end their relationship. (For some reason, this is listed as late 2005 on Wikipedia, with no reference; the divorce was not formally announced until October 2006, with an effective date of December 31, 2006.)

One stipulation of this separation is that Stanton releases a legal statement requiring NI to remove compatibility with FinalScratch timecode from its Traktor software line.

5. Traktor Scratch, Legal Disputes

Early 2007: The NI / Stanton divorce turns ugly. First, NI releases a competing product, Traktor Scratch. Stanton now lacks the important software capable of doing anything with timecode input, so they can only position the audio hardware — arguably the least important part of the equation — now called Final Scratch Open. Stanton also attacks NI, blaming them for compatibility problems between NI-developed FinalScratch software and Intel Macs. NI fires back that Stanton didn’t give NI enough time to complete updates to the FinalScratch software, while tying NI’s hands on updating Traktor via legal action.

June 16, 2007: N2IT files a claim against NI to try to get Traktor Scratch off the market, claiming NI’s familiarity with the underlying timecode technology.

This also illustrates why N2IT’s patent dispute with NI might not apply to other digital timecode products. From N2IT Holdings’ US legal representative, Bingham McCutchen:

In anticipation of working with Stanton Magnetics and Native Instruments to develop a new version of their product that would operate on Windows, N2IT claims it provided confidential information about its technology, and trained Native Investment employees on how their product worked. Last month, according to Billboard Magazine, Native Instruments released Traktor Scratch, which N2IT claims is similar to Final Scratch and uses its patented technology.

Now: By settling with N2IT and licensing the technology, NI effectively ends the Final Scratch chapter of history — at least to the extent that the FinalScratch / Stanton / Traktor / Traktor Scratch line appears to have passed (legally, now) to Traktor Scratch. Stanton is out of the business, left only with an audio interface. But, of course, with competing vinyl timecode systems, NI’s Traktor Scratch is also no longer the only game in town. And there’s nothing preventing N2IT from pursuing legal action with the competitive products, particularly now that they have legal precedent with the NI settlement. We’ll see.

How RZA "Invented" Digital DJing: The Legendary of Replicator

Of course, then there’s the bizarre footnote to this story — if it’s anything other than a random interview rant. In late 2007, RZA from Wu Tang Clan claimed in an interview with KotoriMag.com claimed that he had invented the digital vinyl technology used in Final Scratch on an Atari the year before N2IT — using technology from NASA, and millions of his own money. (Oddly, he also claims that music tech in general has come from space tech. I always suspected Cubase was powered by Tang… erm, the NASA-tested powdered beverage, I mean. Unless that’s how Wu Tang Clan got its name…)

There’s only one little problem: there’s no actual evidence of any of this. That, and the timeframe RZA describes is concurrent with, not prior to, N2IT’s development. So I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Here’s the take from illdoctrine.com, via a ProHipHop.com post of late last year:

And the complete interview:

So, is NI settling with RZA next?

I doubt it. But a RZA Edition Traktor Scratch — perhaps with a big Space Shuttle emblem — now that’d be cool.

References:

Final Scratch history [Thread on FinalScratch Forum]

Final Scratch @ Wikipedia

Updating the timeline:

If anyone has details to fill in, please let us know in comments.

Digital turntablism is nothing new. But Ammobox, debuted at the first-ever CDM Futuristic Music Design Challenge, is unique in a number of ways. What creator Nathan Ramella has done differently:

1. He’s demystified digital vinyl timecode. With no previous DSP programming experience, Nathan created his own custom tool for reading vinyl timecode — and explains how he did it.

2. He’s changed the rules of scratching — it’s now polyphonic scratching. As Nathan puts it, "You get a polyphonic sampler that can layer multiple samples at the same time and scratch them all simultaneously." Yep: no more does digital vinyl simply replicate what records do normally. Here, it actually works as a digital instrument, manipulating layers of samples as you go. Check it out running in Ableton Live as a demo at top, though other hosts could work, as well, if you prefer.

3. He’s giving everything away. You’ll need some vinyl, and because the sonic wonders are all built in Reaktor, you’ll need a copy of NI’s modular mad science lab. But the ensemble itself is released under the GPL v2, which could make it a great way to learn more of the mysteries of Reaktor.

Official Ammobox Page

Download the library, free [ Direct Link ], or head to the rabbit hole that is NI’s User Library

Clarification: I should add that part of what makes Ammobox cool is actually that Nathan’s doing the timecode decoding the "wrong" way. Normally, a timecode system like Ms. Pinky or Traktor Scratch reads speed, direction, and absolute position. Position is the hard part, and the part that’s dependent on sophisticated error correction. What’s clever here is not that AmmoBox is likely to replace those systems (that’s not the point), but that by breaking the rules of how you’re supposed to do digital vinyl, Nathan’s created something different and expressive.

Nathan describes the system in greater detail:

I wrote a universal timecode decoder (universal to the extent that it seems to work with every type of timecode I’ve got, Final Scratch, Traktor Scratch, Torq, Serato, Ms. Pinky), so that I could get rotation speed/direction, then applied that to multi-timbrel samplers that are MIDI controlled. By triggering midi values you can inject a sample into the scratching stream, through voice control you can automatically choke it at a limits to avoid things getting mushy.

Samples can be loops or one-shots, any length (ram permitting)

This opens up a lot of interesting possibilities such as ’simul scratching’, the ability to scratch two or more samples at the same time, ’sequ scratching’, the ability to inject arbitrary samples quantized to the BPM of your host environment. There’s also some tricks I haven’t revealed yet that will be showing up in my next demo..

The juice of this really was getting timecode extracted in some usable form such that it could be applied to samplers / synthesizers, while this technology has existed for a while nobody that I’m aware of has applied it in the fashion I have and this is just the tip of the iceberg.  It gives live performers a lot of leverage for improv and studio knob twiddlers an unprecedented amount of control over scratching.

Nathan reports that he’s back to the labs now working on something else. (Another of his achievements: contributing to the hacked Live API.)

We’re honored to have seen him in person, at a rare live appearance (for the first time in ten years, he says), adding to the mystery of his research. Carry on, man.

Previously:

Teaser: ammoBox Project Digitally Scratches … What?

PS, since it is GPL’ed, if any of you Reaktor nuts go do something with this, hope you’ll let us know about it.