What if a competition didn’t just encourage entrants to try to make a better product? What if it encouraged friendly rivalry between makers to produce entries that were also shared across the community?
That’s the idea behind Digitópia’s upcoming series of competitions, now entering its third year. Digitópia itself is based in Porto, Portugal, at the Casa da Musica. But even if Portugal isn’t exactly in your neighborhood, entrants and onlookers alike can benefit from shared, open sourced contributions.
In fact, even the prizes itself are open projects. The simple, anthropomorphic-looking controller above is a free project. It’s dead-simple, a combination of an IKEA salad bowl, a potentiometer, and ultrasonic distance sensors. But as a result, it’s also inexpensive, simple to use (particularly with the addition of Digitópia’s custom-developed software), and a flexible starting point for further work. (Actually, handling multiple ultrasonics is a bit tricky, too, relative to things like infrared, so that’s a particularly nice addition.)
First up: Max and Pd patchers, your pride is on the line.
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)
For anyone whose complaint about OSC aka OpenSoundControl is that it lacks broad hardware support, I have one word for you:
Unicorns.
OSC now runs on magical unicorns. (Would a unicorn not want high-resolution, human-readable messages encoded with time-stamps? I think they would. And because OSC is transport-independent, it can absolutely run on magical Unicorn Beams.)
No idea what this post is about? Don’t worry — I’ll have a talking unicorn narrate a proper, sophisticated, complete introduction to OSC for beginners soon. They’re magical, so they can make complex topics lucid to any audience.
A new, free software release for Novation’s Launchpad could make your device a lot more usable – and it shows how useful OSC can be for hardware, even if that isn’t OSC hardware. (Now, imagine what OSC-native hardware can do.)
There are plenty of misunderstandings about OSC and the monome out there. Among them, there’s the notion that OSC won’t work without “extra software,” or that the only reason to use OSC messages with something like Novation’s Launchpad grid controller would be to emulate a monome.
Here’s the secret: even if you still don’t know what OpenSoundControl is, the idea is to make messages readable.
Novation released the MIDI message mappings for its Launchpad — that’s a good thing! (See previous post.) But because of the utilitarian and somewhat arbitrary way in which MIDI describes devices, MIDI messages just aren’t terribly readable. For instance, one button is called 50h (in hex), or 80 (in decimal). Where’s 80? Uh…. yeah, no one knows. And simple grid devices like the Launchpad and monome illustrate just how abstract MIDI is. The Launchpad has an 8×8 grid of buttons. You might expect them to be numbered from 0,0 to 7,7, or 1,1 to 8,8. But that’s not actually possible in MIDI.
Will Crossland to the rescue. He’s been working on an OSC wrapper for the Launchpad in Max/MSP (easily ported to other environments if you like). This makes the Launchpad more usable and more logical. It’s just one of what I think could be plenty of efforts to use arrays of buttons on music controllers more fluidly and flexibly. That, in turn, could take the DIY musical ingenuity shown by the monome community to the next level.
Oh, and Will even has an open MIDI networking tool, also built in Max – relevant to the earlier discussion of the day.
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
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