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John and Community,
First of all, I appreciate and have a profound respect with this Remotify idea. It's great to see this effort being unrolled. But I'm already almost quitting, 'cus I'm not able to create a simple and effective Session Box. Let me explain...
I own a Akai MPK249 and plug it along my MB Pro with Ableton Live 9. This hardware come with a Factory Script that works very well for what it's purpose to do. Everything they programmed works fine (Faders, Knobs, Switches and DAW Control). Ok, after researching a lot around internet and discovering this RemoteScript world, I found Remotify 2 month's ago and only this week I have the courage to invest in this idea. I was trying to learn python programming - didn't worked either.
My wish for the MPK249 behavior within Live is to work similar as APC40: with a Session Box to launch clips for live recording or playing samples. This is the most important for me. The rest is a plus.
And yes, I make it work, but I found this problems:
- When I arm a track, the hardware receives a "Midi Note On" and all the 3 Scenes turns Red. With "Remote" options On or Off, this happens anyway. I believe the MPK249 pads only works with 2 color leds per pad. (Image 1)
- If I unarm the same track, the Scenes with Clips appears the way it should (On for Scenes with Clips, Off without Clips). (Image 1)
- I've organized the 4x4 pads of the MPK as 3x4 Scene Launch and the bottom 1x4 as "Clip Stop Button". The Stop buttons have a strange behavior with colors either. It functions well inside the program, but if I hold a little longer, the pad colours go Off, then I need to Hold again to go On. Isn't a hardware problem, 'cus I already mapped the stops buttons with another MPK Preset and it all works fine... Seems to be a MIDI Feedback issue. (Image 2)
- This problema above seems to be similar to the other topic I've opened (I've already gave up of that). When I create a "Arm" button from a Switch on the Hardware (yellow on/off, no coloured leds), I need to press 2 times to arm/unarm, instead of one.
What have worked of all my scripting:
- Faders as Volumes
- Transport Buttons
##
All of this is my present problems. It's seems to me that Remotify is a great idea still being develop by one person only ( <3 developers). And I think it's a great idea that doesn't work for all controllers... Not everything can be mapped trough Remotify 'til now. Maybe trough Python coding it's all possible, but I don't have this skills... So, John, I will give you here some feedback of what I think of remotify so far, ok? Some things that I've missed:
- manual/tutorials with deep explanations.
- search engine on this forum (maybe a deep organization either)
- More MIDI languages as MMC, Sysex, Keystroke, etc... only CC and Notes it's a pain sometimes.
- Save a draw of the last script being developed in the app. I've lost 2 or 3 script studies until I understand I couldn't close Chrome without downloading the script.
- Organize mappings by Add order.
- Play Scenes independent of the Session Box - I'd like to play Scenes as a sequencer in my 4x4 pads.
##
I know It's a lot and I hope there's a way out to my problems. I take the opportunity to ask/suggest another thing:
- Is there a way to edit the Factory Script of my controller? It would be much easier to understand how does it work and "only" add the Session Box above it. I don't know it this information can be grabbed from the .pyc file inside the folder.
For now thats it! Thanks for your attention!
RD
Comments
Image 1.gif above
Image 2.gif below* :D
ps: I add that a EDIT button would be nice too, lol.
Image 2.gif here
Hi RD,
With regards to image 1, when you arm a track, the default LED feedback from Ableton will turn the pads red to signify its armed for recording.
You can change what colour is displayed when armed by adding a custom value for "Record" inside the LED feedback box. Probably adding wither a number "4" or "0" in there will fix it.
With regards to:
"if I hold a little longer, the pad colours go Off, then I need to Hold again to go On."
We don't have any functionality being added to the remote scripts which could be affecting pads when holding it, so I can only assume there's something happening in the hardware or to turn it off or Ableton is sending a note off message to your controller for some reason.
Thank you for the feedback, we will be working on providing deeper tutorials / manual etc.
Adding a search for the community forum is a great idea.
Organising mappings by the order they were added is also a good idea.
Thanks
John
Thanks for your return!
I'm starting to think this controller works with only 2 colors per pad (on/off). That's not being said in the manual, but I have this configuration inside the controller. I've tried a lot of numbers from 0 to 12 with all options of LED FEEDBACK and the result is the same: only 2 colors per pad, purple and red, independent of the action.
I've also noticed that the Stop Clips buttons is "On" when not activated. When I press Stop, it goes off when the stop action occurs. In my ideal, I wish I could see colors blinking when counting for record, and different colours per pad, as in the Ableton Scene View... as I said before, maybe some things isn't possible depending on the hardware and some other things Remotify can't do (yet).
I believe this doesn't have a solution, I'll find a workaround for the performance. Or save money for APC40/Push
Some more stuff that I found out to enhance the idea:
- "Fast Forward" and "Rewind" buttons only walks "step by step" (18 steps I supose). If I use the keyboard arrows with cmd, fn or none, it gives more options to walk by the project.
- In the MPK249 Factory Script, the DAW Control (wich works via KeyStroke) allows me to walk step by step through the scenes and the Track Selection serves the purpose of play or start record clips. The same behavior of arros and enter/return on keyboard. In the app the "Track Selection" works to Jump to some specific track (I didn't get why either).
- The OVERDUB button is actually activating "Session Record Button", not "Midi Arrangement Overdub" inside Live.
- It would be cool if some mappings could be grouped to change the same information. Like, I changes all my faders Volume to Mode 2, instead of one by one.
Solved:
- behavior of needing to enter two times the same button to realize a action: check the "momentary" check box in the APP and the Hardware. Chrome MIDI LEARN sometimes doesn't get right this information (and if it'w Note or CC too)
New Problems:
- if I select "Track Type" as "Specific" and select a "Specific Track Number", should work in the same Track Number always, independently of how I move Session Box or Track Navigation, right?
This is not happening with me. When I navigate the Session box right, all buttons that should be "Specific" jumps one step right too.
- Would be great option of behavior for the "Solo Button" doesn't Unsolo the other tracks, like holding CMD. Is this possible?
Here's the selection of pad colours for the MPK249:
Red, Orange, Amber, Yellow, Green, Green, Blue, Aqua, Light Blue, Blue, Purple, Pink, Hot Pink, Light Purple, Light Green, Light Pink, Grey.
I had a look in the user guide but couldn't see corresponding velocity values for them :( So it would be a case of testing yourself for now. The values go up to 127 so if you've only tried 0 - 12 I'd suggest going a lot higher. A quick way to do this is to put a different value in each LED Feedback option of the session box.
You can change the behaviour of your solo buttons inside Ableton's preferences > record/warp/launch tab. Turning the solo button off for "exclusive" makes solo buttons on /off independent of each other.
If you have a session box active, anything that is set as "track type" "specific" will be relative to the session box position. This was quite a popular user request which we added a while back.
It probably does make sense to have this function be optional, however I'm not sure how possible it would be to have some controls be relative to the session box and others not. I would need to investigate.
The functionality with the stop buttons is, its on/active when there is a playing clip in its track and off/deactivated when there's nothing to stop.
"It would be cool if some mappings could be grouped to change the same information."
Yes this would be a great time saver.
Or maybe the velocity values correspond with the APC40 values:
https://d2r1vs3d9006ap.cloudfront.net/s3_images/1365219/TechHippAPC40MK2...
Or an even quicker way to figure out pad colours is to send midi note data to the controller from Ableton: Here's how to setup sending midi back to your controller: https://support.novationmusic.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207561475-How-do-I-g...
Then you need to draw in notes that correspond to your pads and change their velocities in order to change the pad colours like this guy:
https://youtu.be/qo2NT2VV8lc?t=7m13s
The velocity values are what you need to input in the feedback options.
"I'm starting to think this controller works with only 2 colors per pad (on/off). "
I think this is correct. I own a MPK-261 which should function identically to the 249. With all of the MPK series you can only set two LED colors per drum pad, one for on and one for off. With the editor built into the controller you can select what colors you want these to be but as far as I can tell there is no way to assign more then two colors at a time.
It also sounds - from some of the problems you've been having that yes, there's a feedback issue - like paying the button makes your controller miss the LED feedback, because it's busy with its own feedback.
ie the controller automatically turns a led on when any pad is touched, and then turns it off when it's released, so that internal response interrupts the midi info telling it to do something.
Here's an odd thing to try - with unpredictable, but in my experience sometimes surprisingly helpful results: try different combinations of "Momentary" "Not Momentary" "CC" and "Note'
What I mean is, try Note instead of CC for whatever control you're using. Try telling Remotify that you've made this change and try not telling.
Try saying it's momentary but then setting it up as not.or via versa. Or correctly set, but the opposite of what you think you want. Etc.
The quirks are sometimes unexpected, but so are the solutions.
Good luck!
pp