brendan mccloskey

Is the only solution to communication between Arduino and Ableton Live, to use M4L (plus maybe Maxuino). I have to do a workshop in a few weeks and although I have a solid working knowledge of both Arduino and Max and Ableton Live. I have all three programs and I see from the Ableton site that only the full-blown Suite version of Live comes with M4L. I ain't forking out 3 or 400 dabs for M4L if there's another way?

Hi
Is the only solution to communication between Arduino and Ableton Live, to use M4L (plus maybe Maxuino). I have to do a workshop in a few weeks and although I have a solid working knowledge of both Arduino and Max and Ableton Live. I have all three programs and I see from the Ableton site that only the full-blown Suite version of Live comes with M4L. I ain't forking out 3 or 400 dabs for M4L if there's another way?

arduino-ableton-live

I'm by no means experienced in this, but how about getting the control data from Max to Live via OSC. Just thought this might point you in a direction you could use..?

Yeah, I was kinda thinking the same, but any reference to OSC and Live I've found (here and elsewhere) always seem to include M4L.

. . . I'll keep digging around the OSC route (sic), and see what comes up

I'm sure there's some kind of system bridge you can use to get the control data out of Max and into Live..? Sorry I'm of no big help here, I'm sitting at work and can't dig deeper into this than to provide some thoughts.

No, this is inspiring me to dig deeper Matthias

I found such a bridge, called LiveControl, and installed it. It shows up under the "Control Surface" options in Live, which is a start. Not yet sure how to let Live know where the OSC data is coming from, I'll have a little noodle around with udpsend in Max and see what happens, although I too am a little in the dark about such things

at the risk of turning this into a blog, I also found LiveOSC, so I'll play with that today as well.

If you're on OSX: I sometimes use Osculator (

) as a bridge between Ableton Live and Max or whatever. It translates OSC to MIDI if you want to.

If you're on OSX: I sometimes use Osculator (http://www.osculator.net) as a bridge between Ableton Live and Max or whatever. It translates OSC to MIDI if you want to.


Yes, I forgot about Osculator, but I'm Win7 here sadly. I haven't had any luck with LiveOSC or LiveControl, there's obviously a key component missing, like Python or the LiveAPI or yada yada yada, and I don't have the time or energy to devote to this. I'll just use a colleagues workstation, which has M4L and I should be good to go. I'm just passing some simple sensor data into Ableton synths via serial.

I do work a lot with Arduino->OSC/MIDI->Live.

What I do in some classes is I use a Max Patch (not M4L) that runs along Live translating the Arduino data into MIDI. From there you can route them via a virtual MIDI port to Live. The students can use this patch with runtime or as standalone if you prefer.

In my own Live sets for performances i have build a M4L device that collects OSC data from the Arduino based controllers and from there I distribute them with global send/receive objects to other M4L devices that i.e. allow to select/assign Live Parameters to the incoming data by clicking on them much like "right part" (in the UI) of the "Max API AMap1.amdx" in the M4l Building Tools package. While this approach is great in flexibility and allows to build custom controls in a live set literally within seconds, it has it's limitations when controlling a large number of Live Parameters as CPU usage goes up.

If you use udpreceive directly in side M4l and Max 6.1 make sure that the used Max version is 6.1.9. There were some bugs that could cause Live to crash in earlier versions.

Hi Brendan,
I do work a lot with Arduino->OSC/MIDI->Live.

What I do in some classes is I use a Max Patch (not M4L) that runs along Live translating the Arduino data into MIDI. From there you can route them via a virtual MIDI port to Live. The students can use this patch with runtime or as standalone if you prefer.
In my own Live sets for performances i have build a M4L device that collects OSC data from the Arduino based controllers and from there I distribute them with global send/receive objects to other M4L devices that i.e. allow to select/assign Live Parameters to the incoming data by clicking on them much like "right part" (in the UI) of the "Max API AMap1.amdx" in the M4l Building Tools package. While this approach is great in flexibility and allows to build custom controls in a live set literally within seconds, it has it's limitations when controlling a large number of Live Parameters as CPU usage goes up.

If you use udpreceive directly in side M4l and Max 6.1 make sure that the used Max version is 6.1.9. There were some bugs that could cause Live to crash in earlier versions. 

Jan, what number of parameters starts to give you a noticeable increase?

I could have been more precise on that. It is not simply the absolute amount of parameters, but a combination with the kind of input data I use. The "messier" the input is the more likely I'll reach the limit of my system. Simple on/off switch like data are usually no problem. But if I use data streams i.e from force or distance sensors it has a stronger effect especially if many of them fire simultaneously. Good speed limiting and smoothing before distributing them across the Live Set becomes important in such situations. The Live Set with the largest amount of remote controlled parameters I currently use has 80 params controlled via OSC from 12 different sensors most of them delivering a continuous data streams when active.

Hi Lee,
I could have been more precise on that. It is not simply the absolute amount of parameters, but a combination with the kind of input data I use. The "messier" the input is the more likely I'll reach the limit of my system. Simple on/off switch like data are usually no problem. But if I use data streams i.e from force or distance sensors it has a stronger effect especially if many of them fire simultaneously. Good speed limiting and smoothing before distributing them across the Live Set becomes important in such situations. The Live Set with the largest amount of remote controlled parameters I currently use has 80 params controlled via OSC from 12 different sensors most of them delivering a continuous data streams when active.
J


Interesting... I've been working on an M4L OSC layer along with some MxdCore updates to improve the performance of the max/live boundary - might like to get you involved in some testing at some point if you're interested....?

yes I would be, definitely. mech.jan [at] the-G-oogle-MAIL-thing [dot] com (as PM is in the making...)

I use a Max Patch (not M4L) that runs along Live translating the Arduino data into MIDI.

Could you tell me which patch you are using in order to do that? could you possibly paste it here or send it to me?

Arduino --> Ableton Live