SooperLooper Forum

Hey folks!

First-time poster here, and of course it's with a question . . .

A little background:

I recently started a project (http://www.davidkain.com for more info) with a buddy of mine in the hopes of creating a new way to integrate electronic music with a live band in a way that emphasizes performance and the dynamics of improvisation. It's a little ambitious, but we are pretty excited about the possibilities!

Real-time audio manipulation is at the heart of this project, which is why I've turned to SL to start. I love its flexibility, and the price just can't be beat. I'm marrying it with Ableton Live (v7 as of now) at least for this software iteration of the project.

On to the question:

SooperLooper is currently running as an AU within Ableton Live 7. It is configured as a MIDI device in the Preferences menu along with my controller (in this case a Kontrol49).

I was able to map "loop1 record" to a CC (Ch. 1, 000) without issue. I assigned subsequent CC values in channel 1 to my controller as usual, but when I attempted to map them to other controls within SL (e.g. "loop1 mute," "loop2 record," etc . . .) they weren't recognized! Bizarre, right? Live is still receiving MIDI messages, so it doesn't appear to be a problem with the Kontrol49.

Using SL's manual mapping did not seem to function either. The keyboard shortcuts seem to work fine.

For reference, I am running on OSX 10.5. SL was loaded in an Audio track.

Thanks for your help!

There are several ways to do MIDI bindings when SL is a plugin in Live, it sounds like you may be mixing a few different ways.

The most common is to set up a MIDI track, choose its input to be your hardware device, and its output to be the plugin (which is inserted on an audio track), set Monitoring to In. This passes all the midi events into SL and lets it deal with the bindings (from SL's GUI midi bindings tab in its Preferences). This is the most flexible, as you have a bit more control over how the events are interpreted when SL is in charge of them.

Another way, which it sounds like you may have tried, is to use the plugin parameters the SL exposes to Live and try to map them to midi using Live's interface. First of all, it only shows the first 100 parameters, and you don't have much control over how the binding works (at least that I could figure out).

SL also exposes virtual midi ports to the system too, which you could route using a virtual patchbay like Midi Patchbay, or MidiPipe, but you probably don't need to use it when you have the first option.

If you try the first way and you are still having problems, send me your saved Live set and I can try to track down the issue.

Thanks, Jesse!

I modified my Live set to include a MIDI track which transmits messages to the Audio track hosting SL. This time I had more success with the MIDI-learn function in SL's context menu, but ran into a wall again with certain parameters just refusing to map in certain loops.

This isn't an SL issue, but I am also noticing "lost" MIDI notes. After binding a button to Record in SL, for example, I'll hit it enough for the light on the controller to trigger, but SL doesn't register anything. Is this a latency issue, or something else? This occurs with more than one controller, so I don't think it's faulty hardware.

Thanks again for all your help!

Let me know which events you are binding, CCs, notes, etc? Live may be trying to be too smart and assuming you don't want to receive multiple events with the same value.... hard to say.

I did some additional testing this weekend and it looks like this is the case. My testing wasn't extensive, but it appears as if Live doesn't like certain CCs (I was using CCs exclusively) mapped to controls, at least on SL.

For whatever reason, certain values refuse to map to SL!

Testing with Live 8 had the same result, for what it's worth. Finding exactly which CC values Live is wonky with is probably in order, but until that kind of testing is done (assuming this issue isn't unique to me) a decent workaround is to just choose a different value.

Cheers!