Max For Live Sneak Peak from max4live on Vimeo.

Suddenly, I have an image of American Ableton hackers patching on their MacBook over Thanksgiving turkey.

After a long, long wait, a public beta of Max for Live is available. The software incorporates the full version of Max/MSP/Jitter – complete with visual output, video processing, and 3D capabilities – with the Live host. Max patches operate with all their usual capabilities as devices inside Live. User interface elements are available to give Max patches conventional Ableton device interfaces, and there are even pre-built elements for useful functions like frequency displays and MIDI patterns. Via the Live API, Max for Live patches are also able to control most elements of the Live interface.

Because of Max’s networking capabilities, Max for Live devices can also be used to route OpenSoundControl data into Live. That isn’t necessarily with the same ease as you might route MIDI, and there’s still no native support in the Live interface, but it is a step forward.

Our friend Michael at max4live.info has been busy documenting the new software. His overview video is at top, and for OSC coverage, see his tutorial [part 1 | part 2].

Updated: Pricing has now been announced.
Max for Live is not included with Live 8 or even (perhaps surprisingly) Live Suite. It will be a US$299 / EUR249 download, available separately, on top of the cost of Live 8 or Live Suite 8. If you already own Max, you’ll have a set of crossgrades available:
1. You own Live. You can add Max for Live for US$99.
2. You don’t own Live, and want just Live. You can get that and Max for Live for US$449.
3. You don’t own Live, and want the whole Suite. Suite plus Max for Live crossgrade, US$699.

Total cost:
Max owners without Live: US$449-699
Live owners without Max: US$299 + cost of the upgrade to Live 8
Max + Live owners: US$99 + cost of the upgrade to Live 8

I think this could arguably be worth the investment, but given the discontinuation of support for developing VST, RTAS, and AU plug-ins in Max – a feature that was formerly free – I expect some resistance. Also, as previously announced, there is no known Max for Live “runtime,” meaning Max patch developers don’t really have a distribution outlet for work made in Max for Live, other than other Max for Live users.

Sign up for the public beta on Ableton’s site, and you’ll be able to grab the downloads (details below). You must be an Ableton Live 8 owner, though you don’t need to own Max 5:
http://www.ableton.com/maxforlive/beta

At the bottom of the page, you’ll have a direct link to download Live 8.1 (the official current build of Live is 8.0.9 otherwise), and a link to Cycling’s site to download Max. (Note: the Max link worked this morning, then promptly disappeared, so it’s possible they’re uploading an updated build is now back up.)

There are full instructions there. I was able to simply click a button and become a beta tester; hopefully you have the same experience. You’ll need to install two pieces of software, both Ableton Live 8.1 on the Live side and Max 5.1.

For the Python-based Live API, and the MIDI and OSC interfaces based on it, this should also come as good news. Live 8.1 should theoretically represent a more stable, feature-complete, fully documented version of the Live API under the hood in Live. That means even without Max for Live, it may be possible to, say, route an OSC input into Live as easily as a MIDI control surface.

If you’d like to join in with other people working on hacking Ableton Live and ask questions, try out our Noisepages group, which should now be functioning properly with a forum, wire, and networking features. More to come with this, with Max for Live, with OSC, with other tools, with… yeah, I’m glad I own a coffee maker.

http://noisepages.com/groups/ableton-hackers

As the company turns 10, Ableton has introduced a set of discounts and giveaways, the most notable of which is a new entry-level edition of Live. Live Intro smooths out a lot of the wrinkles between different starter versions of Live, from LE to hardware bundles. At $99, “Intro” finally gets a logical feature set:

• Full ReWire support, both as host and client (or “Slave” and “Master,” if you want to be all kinky about it)
• Full MIDI support, including remote control, output, MIDI clock (though none of the nifty “external device” support for outboard gear)
• Warping and time stretching, minus the “Complex” and “Complex Pro” modes
• 4 VST/AU instruments, 4 VST/AU effects per project
• Missing Vocoder, Looper, Multiband Dynamics, Overdrive, Frequency Shifter – but you do get SImpler and Impulse
• 2 in, 2 out audio, though you can have up to 64 tracks and unlimited MIDI tracks
• No track grouping
• Full WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC support
• New extras: 7 GB of audio content in the boxed version, 1 GB in the download version

In other words, you get a more-than-capable version of Live for a hundred bucks. It’s certainly enough for anyone who just wants to inject some Live functionality into their ReWire host of choice, and allows people interested in experimenting with Live a non-crippled version they can use. Mercifully, Ableton is offering a free upgrade to Intro from Live LE users — a good thing, because Intro includes some features and content LE lacks. (Okay, it’s still probably not great news if you spent $200 on LE, but at least you don’t miss out on the features.)

Live Intro product page
Live Intro comparison

Sound Packs, Discounts

Already a Live owner? Through January 10, Ableton has a number of deals for existing Live users:

http://www.ableton.com/able10

Discounts on Live upgrades, up to 20%

Free artist packs — from some wonderful artists, too, including Apparat, Mum, Thavias Beck, and our friends at Covert Operators, among others.

The artist packs are especially nice. And Novation is shipping the Launchpad. Of course, the big news today is really Max for Live, so I’d better … keep typing. (Damn you, fingers!)

Novation’s Launchpad, its affordable (<$200) "grid" controller, may have a big Ableton logo on it. But underneath, it's just a MIDI controller. Bi-colored LEDs, containing a red and green element for red, green, and amber output (amber = red+green), can be triggered using simple MIDI note and control messages. That means, whether you're looking forward to Max for Live or you're sequencing in a tracker or writing Processing sketches, you can use the Launchpad just like any other MIDI controller.

One of the things I thought was a major demerit for Akai was the fact that they failed to ship a MIDI implementation for the Akai APC40. MIDI implementations are the charts of MIDI messages we've had since the very first MIDI devices came out in the 80s. They're usually printed in the back pages of the manual, and even the cheapest gear has often had one.

Score: Novation 1, Akai 0. Novation has done the MIDI documentation, and then some. Its MIDI “Programmers Reference” is out even before the official Launchpad ship date. And rather than just doing a MIDI chart and assuming people know how to read it, they’ve taken the care to fully explain the way MIDI messages work, how to calculate the right messages, and how to really use this. Experts will have all the information they need, but newcomers will also find they can spend a little time and learn how to do what they want.

Launchpad Support with Downloads (see Programmer’s Reference at the bottom)
Via: Novation released Launchpad Programming Guide, and Protocol [Nezoomie's Zen Wave Blog - great read]

It’s listed as “for Max/MSP programmers,” but anyone using MIDI will want to have a look; that’s obviously relevant to far more than just Max. (In fact, there’s not a single mention of anything specific to Max in the document.)

What might people do with stuff like this? Well, as of just four hours ago, Matt DiFonzo lets us know he’s written a simple monome emulator. It’s even got a clever name:

nonome – monome emulator for Novation Launchpad

There’s some bad news mixed with the good. Even with something as simple as a grid of buttons, MIDI isn’t as friendly as it could be. I still would like to have a MIDI editor for the Launchpad so you can reassign buttons if you like — that’s a feature, incidentally, available on rival Ohm and Block hardware from Livid Instruments. Also, the documentation reveals that Launchpad uses “a low-speed version of USB,” which runs at a maximum of 400 messages per second, thus taking 200 milliseconds to update a Launchpad’s LEDs. (There are some workarounds, but they’re … more work. Clarification: Once you double up messages, though, you can get this to a more acceptable gap, and that’s for updating all the LEDs, not the latency of input messages.)

Also, here’s a hint to Novation: use a Creative Commons license for that document. That way, your users will be free to document even more ingenious solutions and friendly guides. You win, and your users win. For instance, I have the illustration here, which I should be able to do for purposes of reporting on this story. But can I write my own how-to guide using your guide? Why not make it explicit to encourage me to do so? (They list the PDF as “proprietary,” though there’s no explicit license, and I think they just mean “proprietary” as in “what we’ve done on our hardware.”)

That’s a difference between open hardware and closed hardware, but I don’t even want to belabor the point — CC licenses are something a commercial company like Novation could easily use. In fact, if anyone at Novation or Ableton would like to talk to me about why I think it’s a good idea, I’d like to extend an open invitation. I’m no legal expert, but I can explain what it means to me as a user and developer, and connect you with some of the right people at Creative Commons and the CC-using community.

But those gripes aside, kudos to Novation for getting this documentation out here. I think it’s really good news for people experimenting with grid controllers. And we’ll be looking at how all of these tools, hardware and software, fit together, and how open source development can make them more powerful.

Patchers and coders and hackers: if you’re interested in working on interoperability between all this stuff, let us know.

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.

Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on.

It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really make sense. It’d be unfair to ask Ricardo Villalobos live up to some of the titans – Bob Dylan saying CDs have “no stature” and “have sound all over them,” and Elton’ John’s classic call to “tear down the Internet.” (Not to mention, in the end I think we wound up agreeing with them and turned Elton’s quote into a brand-new verb.) As with Elton John and Bob Dylan, I love and respect Villalobos’ work, no less so as he says things with which I disagree. But Ricardo Villalobos does get special credit for claiming in a recent Resident Advisor interview, among other things, that what has really hurt sound quality today is the lack of cheap drum machines from the 80s, because they were analog. Or they weren’t, but it was as if they were. Or something. (If you think this might earn some ire from Ableton loyalists, you’re right.)

No. I think the development is going in the opposite direction because everyone is making tracks in programs like Ableton, which has an OK sound engine. When I started making music 20 years ago, you had to at least buy a mixer, then some synthesizers, a drum machine—which is the best quality possible of a sampled drum. There was a pureness of the source of the music. It was analog, direct.

Ah, yes, the good old days. Back in the day, digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital-to-analog-converters were real digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital -to-analog-converters. It was analog, direct – well, aside from the fact that it was digital and not direct, but it was real … um … analog … digital. Pulse code modulation was real, pure pulse code modulation, not like the pulse code modulation you kids have today. Not like now, when people don’t … own… mixers. It’s not like you kids today, you people who use Ableton, people like… Ricardo Villalobos. (Villalobos is, in fact, a notable Live user.)

I mean, at least it’s a novel argument. Usually, you get the “mixing in the box is bad” and “computers aren’t real” argument from crusty audio engineers with massive outboard analog mixing boards, not electronic musicians. Recently, many experienced engineers I’ve talked to have come to the side of accepting that “in-the-box” recordings in software can be just as good as their analog counterparts. So, we may have reached a real landmark, a world in which electronic musicians claim digital’s no good and turntables are the only way to listen, while engineers experienced with analog claim just the opposite.

Let’s go back in time. For the record, twenty years ago by my calculations would be 1989.

The drum machine you might have bought then could be the Alesis HR-16, or perhaps a Roland TR-707. They’re fantastic, unique-sounding instruments. But “the best quality possible” is not generally a phrase associated with instruments of this era. We love them because they aren’t 192kHz, 64-bit multisamples recorded from 30 microphones and shipped on a 100 GB hard drive, because “quality” isn’t actually everything. And if you bought a new mixer in 1989, I assume you picked up something like Mackie’s just-released LM-1602, rather than an SSL. Of course, you really could go do that now. In fact, Ableton Live recently added 64-bit processing in the signal chain; the software that does more aliasing to account for lower bitrates is actually Pro Tools.

He goes on:

The thing is, you have the limitation of the program, the limitation of the digital mixing which is happening inside the computer, you have the limitation of the sound sources of the synthesizers—the virtual synthesizers. Even the sound engine is playing a very big role in the whole sound of the product. If you have a good turntable and good speakers, you can hear it is made in Ableton. Logic, for example, is very neutral in sound but Ableton…you can hear it in two seconds.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Live does have an overused sound – but that comes from people using effects presets as-is, people not knowing how to mix, people time stretching and warping without adjusting settings or taking care to think about the impact on its sound.

The idea that you have to use a turntable to hear these things, or generally to hear quality issues in a track produced entirely digitally is… well, an interesting theory. (It’d be like testing the fidelity of your inkjet printer by first taking a Polaroid of the output.)

They have all of these virtual instruments that are calculated by a computer, and you have a certain space where you have to put everything. And when you want to leave this space, you have to live with compromises, the compromises of digital mixes and recordings.

Now, perhaps I’m wrong, but I thought that if for some reason you thought you needed to mix on an analog board and record to, say, analog reel-to-reel, you were no less able to do that with the analog outs of your MacBook Pro than with your 606.

And what exactly was in those vintage drum machines, if not a computer making  calculations? Eleven secret herbs and spices? Elves with slide rules?

But this is the beauty of interviews – you can say whatever you want. And it definitely beats boring.

There is also one statement with which I wholeheartedly agree:

People are finding it easy to publish something without any controls. And this is the problem with the internet in general. There is so much information, and no one knows if it’s true or not. It’s just there. It’s an information monster.

It’s almost as though the Internet is a place in which people can make any wild claim they wish, without anyone questioning its basis in reality or fact.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1128

The Covert Seq – Creating patterns and Presets from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

The Covert Operators and Bjorn Vayner have become my favorite go-to source for wild Ableton Live hacks. And even before the release of Max for Live, Bjorn has built some terrific, simple step-sequencers using Live’s Racks feature. That’s just the Racks feature – no Max patches or hidden features anywhere to be found. Sure, I suppose the clip view itself can be seen as a kind of step sequencer, but this gives you a unique way of generating sequences.

If you just want to begin playing with step sequencing in Live, Bjorn has a new download, aptly called The Covert Sequencer, as seen in the video at top. It’s free, it’s fun, it celebrates the 5th Anniversary of Covert Ops and the 10th of Ableton Live (good grief!), and it’s all voodoo built with dummy clips and MIDI effects.

Full post, downloads, and video tutorials:
The Covert Seq [The Covert Operators]

If you want to try your hand at the ninja skills behind all of this, Bjorn posted a screencast back in August revealing his secrets:

Making a Step Sequencer in Ableton Live. from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

And if you like this sort of thing, definitely don’t miss The Covert Operators’ exclusive creation for CDM, making elaborate use of the racks and slicing features of Live 7 and later:

Exclusive: Free Ableton Live Slicing Pack by Covert Operators

Slice of Winter from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

From Sarah and Lara Grant, we have a dress that makes music, with tube-like apparatus made of felt for connecting sound, modular fashion. From the raucous duo Great Tiger, we get a homebrewed arcade controller Ableton Live that mashes loops into dance music with a quick button push. Yep, it’s Handmade Music time again in New York tomorrow Thursday. If you’re anywhere in the area, come on down – and feel free to bring your own projects and/or expect some surprise technological appearances. If not, we’ve still got some MP3s, visuals, and how-to information to share.

If you do make it to Brooklyn, we can promise some behind-the-scenes demonstrations, noise, at least one live set, and free, ice-cold Colt 45s while they last.

Read on for event details, a preview of the projects, and videos and downloadable MP3s from Great Tiger.

Wearable Patch Cords in a Sonic Dress

Sound artists, inventors, and designer sisters Sarah and Lara Grant present an in-progress audiological fashion experiment involving patch cords made from felt. (I love the gorgeous conceptual drawing.) They’re working with a dancer to make this into a performance, and we get to see the work evolve before our eyes.

the title of the piece is ‘Audiotrails’, playing off of the word ‘entrails’, since as you’ll from the drawing attached, we are designing a dress that has several felted cords coming out from the gut which will act as patch cords. These patch cords connect to different parts of the garment to produce various noises and effects.

What we will be bringing is an example of our patch cord concept in the form of a felted swatch and a concept drawing of the final piece, which we have not completed, but hope to present either next month or the following at handmade music. We will be talking about our process and answering any questions based on that. Sarah and I had been envisioning our set up on a table in the smaller room, since had not been planning to perform and since our goal has been to show our progress of a project that would take a couple months to finish.

Here’s a look at one of the coils, a felted patch cable that can then become part of the garment:

Sarah Grant has also done fascinating research into what she calls “felted signal processing,” in which textiles can themselves become active sound elements.

Push the Button: DIY Arcade Controller for Ableton Live and the Button-Mashing Music of Great Tiger

That’s button mashing in a good way. Inspired by games, fast push-button moves and combos, and electronic music, the duo Great Tiger has built a custom rig for mashing samples in Ableton Live.

The custom arcade controller, looking like what happens when an 80s arcade cabinet and the monome have a love child, was featured on the DJ blog DJ TechTools. (Worth reading that article for lots more technical details from the duo.) This video by Great Tiger gives a behind-the-scenes look at how the hardware is used with Live and how it’s put together.

Here’s Great Tiger live in action at Brooklyn’s Red Star:

Free Great Tiger MP3 Downloads

Great Tiger were kind enough to share a couple of their fun tracks with us, so you can grab them wherever you are.

Great Tiger on MySpace | Facebook

Come Visit Us

RSVP to handmade@3rdward.com OR
RSVP on Facebook

Handmade Music’s Brooklyn edition is held at 3rd Ward in East Williamsburg, a brisk ride on the L train out of Manhattan.

FREE, as always
…plus FREE Colt 45
7:30-10:00 pm, Thursday, October 15 (arrive by 9 or you’ll miss a lot)

Presented by CDM with our friends at MAKE, Etsy, and XLR8R

View Larger Map

As computer music practice – part composition, part instrumental play – spreads, the idea of software interface as performance tool is becoming second nature. Putting those opposable thumbs and sensitive fingertips to work, multitouch controllers are growing in number, variety, and sophistication. Berlin-based artist Marco Kuhn shows off his beautiful creation, the PlayBox multitouch hardware, and its first app, PlayLive. That first software focuses on Ableton Live performance, but Live could be just the beginning – Marco has worked with Pd in the past and promises other apps to come. He’s interested in selling this device in the future, and he shares with us the tools he used to create this work for those of you doing development along similar lines.

The Project:

“Play Box” is is a User Interface for Natural User Interaction.
? allows multi-touch and object recognition (TUIO marker)
? hovering is also possible
? 22 ” TFT display , 1680 x 1050 pixel
? robust
? plug`n play

“Play Live” is a dedicated multitouch controller surface for Ableton Live.

- GUI Elements support multi-touch interaction
- easy to setup , just load the “Play” Control Surface
- you need no controller assignment
- you can control 32 tracks and 127 scenes, that are 4064 clips
- track controls are mute, solo, record, send1, send2, pan, level
- scene feedback name and state
- clip feedback color, name and state
- Transport control
- 2 Returns
- Master
- support bidirectional communication
- display track level meter, name

The whole app is coded in python.
- use Python Ableton Live API
- and libavg www.libavg.de for the GUI and Trackingengine
- PyPortMidi receive/send Midi Messages

“Play Live” Future plans:
- FX View per Track
- subpage for abstract clip controlling

I tested it with my mac book pro, “Play Live” and “Ableton Live” is running at the same machine. It should work on all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X). That Project started with my Diploma Thesis in Applied Computer Science 1 year ago.

Everything is coded and built by myself. The GUI – elements has been designed by Gösta Wellmer.

In this work, I created a GUI-Controller Library which allow me to Develop very rapidly Multitouch Interfaces for other Audio Environments.
More Apps coming soon ;-)

I [plan] to sell the” Play Box” and Apps like “Play Live” if anyone is interested.
The price is yet not specified.

That`s not my first multitouch Interface. 2 Years ago I created forfour – http://forfour.hi-pi.de/
- used PD, Processing, Reactivision and OGRE.
But the “Play Box” is another level;-)

For more on the project:
www.hi-pi.de/play

I hope to have video to share soon – and yeah, it’s time to plan another visit to Berlin.

Bliss – SevenUpLive 1.4 Preview from bar|none on Vimeo.

monome lovers have come from all over the planet to exchange tips and creative ideas and check out music here in Princeton, New Jersey at the Monomeet. I’m here shooting some video, so expect a feature and links to some of the projects in a few days. In the meantime, JP has set up a live stream, so you can listen in while you clean your studio or whatever you happen to be doing on this Saturday afternoon / evening. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more! (Incidentally, there’s quite a lot of discussion here that’s relevant whether or not you own the monome hardware, really getting to the heart of open source and DIY musical tools. I’ll certainly be sharing some of that soon.)

Updated: what a Saturday! The monomeet was incredibly packed with goodness, from crazy DIY projects to terrific music. And it’s also worth saying, the event wound up being about far more than just the monome; the object becomes a catalyst for all sorts of other discussions of open source and audiovisual technique. I have some video that looks good, lots of cameras were rolling, photographers snapping – expect good documentation over the coming days.

You can also follow the post-event discussion on the monome board.

If you have videos to post, there’s a special monomeet Vimeo group. To get things kicked off, check out the SevenUpLive preview, contributed virtually by bar|none who couldn’t make the event. (See the monome boards for a discussion and download of the software in the video.)
http://www.vimeo.com/groups/monomeetfall2009

If you have photos, of course I always watch the CDM Flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cdmu/pool/

For blog posts and so on – or if you couldn’t make it and have specific questions for the monome folks – you can holler on Twitter or via our contact form:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/contact/

In the Pocket (Rhodes and Moog Light Paint) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

Fantastic, hip, soulful keys couple with brilliant stop-motion editing, as a Moog and Rhodes keyboard are splashed with light painting, in this new music video from Ethan Goldhammer. (See his blog for more.) It’s the perfect example of how a much-seen technique can retain its novelty when used creatively, especially as the sound itself seems to dance in light-up oscilloscope patterns.

Background:

Original music by Ethan Goldhammer and S. Burke.
Time Lapse footage shot in August 2008 on Block Island, RI.
Stop motion and light paint September 2008 in Cambridge, MA.

The lesson here: gear pr0n and special effects work perfectly when they visualize the way we feel about our musical objects and sounds.

Okay, so how did he do it? Ethan responds:

Ableton all the way. Recorded as loops with an [Akai] apc, then arranged later. The secret is also, making the animations, rendering them in [Final Cut Pro] but then WARPING them in ableton to the proper timing and bouncing them back to FCP.

Nicely done. Of course, this is why some audiovisualists have turned to Sony Vegas for Windows – formerly developed by Sonic Foundry, Vegas is actually half audio, half visual software. On the other hand, Live is a comfortable and flexible tool that does many things Vegas can’t.

Ethan also has a beautiful rendering of “Air on a G String,” the second cut from the legendary Switched on Bach. Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, please don’t stop Ethan; I’d love to see more collaboration instead.

Air on a G String (Oscilliscoped) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.