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Max for Live Abstractions

Blog Post:

Max is a visual environment for making your own MIDI, audio and video contraptions. I've been learning how to use it since I got my early present last week - Max for Ableton Live.

Using Max, you can now interact with Ableton in ways that were either not possible, or only possible using python - a programming language for people who like to concern themselves with whitespace.

So I've been bugged that there is no way to map a MIDI message to trigger the currently selected Ableton clip. Done.

I'd also like to be able to record enable the currently selected track. Done.

Map Undo and Redo to a MIDI message. Done and done!

I had more wishes and managed to bang them out in one night by building on the Live API abstraction examples. The result is a little max device than can navigate around the session view and record and play clips and also control volume. The most challenging part was creating a subpatch which did a volume level 'pickup mode', so that switching between tracks and touching the volume pedal doesn't make the level jump from 0 to where the pedal is. You need to bring the pedal down to the level of the track to 'pick it up'.

Here's how it looks.

And the main patch - All the crap at the top is due to the mapping not working, so I had to make a big mess of connecting my midi notes from the FCB1010 to my Ableton buttons until they make the buttons work with midi notes and cc. Makes me wonder if they actually use this stuff.

So I created a few M4L Abstractions of my own for use in this device, based on the abstractions included with the M4L product. I present them here, zipped for your enjoyment. Place them in a folder on your computer and in MaxMSP go to Options>File Preferences and add the directory. You should then be able to type the name in a new object and it will be usable in your project.

Be warned, there's nothing advanced in here.