Need help: building a tool to help process clip packs for DJing

MDMT's icon

We DJ (and produce) in Ableton, and use clip packs for the tracks in our DJ library constructed,with a few tweaks, as advocated by producer and tech guru ill.gates: http://illgates.com/clippacktutorial/

In general, we love using them, but they can be a bit of a hassle to create, and somewhat prone to human error. To solve this, we've been looking into Max as a method to perform as much of the busy work as possible.

Ideally what we want to create is a patch that will take a clip to which we have added warp markers at the beginning of each musical section (this we need to do on our own), and do the following it it:

1.Split the clip into one for each section as given by the warp markers
2.Set the clip start and end times to the beginning and end of those sections
3.Rename each clip "# bars: " where # is its actual number of bars
4.Set the follow action of each clip except the last to play next after #
5.Make a copy of each clip in the track directly to the right without follow actions, but with the loop set over the whole section and toggled on

Most of this shouldn't be a problem, except I'm not sure whether there is a way to get clip warp marker locations with the Live API. If there is, please let me know! If there isn't, my current plan to mitigate this problem is to have the patch take an array of bar values as an input parameter and just enter them manually as we add the warp markers, but please let me know if there is a better way to accomplish this.

I'm also not sure how to access/set the clip followi actions. Does anyone have any experience with this? If it presently can't be done, is there a foolproof and effective way I could replicate the follow on behavior automatically with A max device on the tracks I DJ from so that it tells ableton to play the next clip once its done unless it receives a stop command? We DJ with an APC 40, and the follow action makes the current clips light blink, and it'd be really nice to keep that visual feedback going if we have to use max device to auto follow. We definitely do NOT want to need to set all the follow actions manually as its a bit obnoxious and has bad performance consequences if we set it wrong.

I'll be sure to share the tools I build with the world for free, but I'm new to Max (not to programming though) and need guidance.

Thanks!!

S4racen's icon

Hi there,

the follow actions aren't available through the LIVE API i'm afraid... You have to go through all the logic of building your own....

http://isotonikstudios.com/modular_max4live/ has the follow actions covered including triggering scenes if youd prefer...

Whereas http://isotonikstudios.com/isotonik_max4live_akai_apc40/ is pretty much what you're looking for when it comes to the APC40 integration...

Cheers
D