Friday, July 17, 2009

Don't Mess With Open Source



With the APC-40 out for controlling Ableton Live, we have seen probably the tightest integration yet with Ableton. Other controllers like the monome and JazzMutant Lemur can't help but be jealous. MaxForLive was going to be the holy grail for integrating controllers with Live, but it has been slow to be released. Enter "LiveAPI" which is a python remote script API to Live, put together by members of the Open Source community. This API gives MaxForLive functionality now! It was no mean feat as these APIs to Ableton needed to be discovered and uncovered without any help or documentation from Ableton.

Thread is here on monome.org
LiveAPI Discussion

One of the fruits of this effort is a new Lemur template for API-40 like clip launching control from the Lemur. It works wonderfully an has some tricks up its sleeve the APC-40 can't match like textual labels on the clips, tracks and scenes. Even the colors you choose in your set synchronize with the Lemur. This template was provided on the Covert Operators site here with an instructional video on how to set it up.

Covert Operators Lemur Template for LiveAPI

Live 8 Lemur Clip Launcher by The CovOps from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

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