Novation Launchpad Dream Setup

[duhgrantgordon]

Let me preface this by saying that SL is dope and thank you Jesse for such a wonderful piece of software. Also, I'm not even sure if this is possible but I have to reach out and try. I dream of a SL rig where I use my foot controller to create a loop and then a corresponding button on the lauchpad lights up once the loop is playing, from there I can pause or unpause the loop via launchpad, then select another looper via launchpad and record again via foot controller etc etc. Basically it's a live looping set up that allows you to play the lauchpad the way it was designed to be used, just controlling SL loops instead of clips in Ableton. Now, I already have the foot controller part down, and selecting/pausing/unpausing SL via lauchpad is easy to set up as well. The part I can't figure out is how to tell the Lauchpad that a loop has been created and is playing in SL. I can communicate to the lauchpad phonetically via Bomes and tell it to light up anyway I want. But as far as I can tell SL doesn't export any midi commands or status updates or anything that I can use to automatically communicate this information to Bomes other than midi clock. Is this a fact? And if so, is there any other way to make this dream a reality? Thanks for reading.

-Grant

[jesse]

It doesn't output midi events for the status of loops, but it does output OSC messages. I bet you could use Osculator or Max/MSP to rig up a system where the OSC messages from SL regarding loop state can be converted into CC events. I don't have the time right now to set up such a system for you, but others might have something already.....

Are you running SL standalone (with JACK), or in a plugin host?

[duhgrantgordon]

Thanks for the response Jesse. I had a hunch about the OSC commands and I've been snooping around for the past few hours trying to figure it out, unfortunately it seems most osc stuff is a little over my head technically, although I'm going to keep trying, maybe Osculator, I havn't tried that yet. I'm using SL as a AU plugin in Ableton. Thanks again!

-Grant

[duhgrantgordon]

Quick update, trying to use Osculator. I have ableton running and SL in an audio track. I tried to set the OSC-in port in OSCulator to 10051 the default SL port but it says it's already in use. I use a different port and hit some SL commands and nothing happens. How do I get SL's OSC out into Osculator? If knew that I could possibly figure it out from there!

-Grant

[jesse]

OK, I don't think Osculator is going to be useful here at all. But I'll include the following directions to get it talking a little to you for reference.

There is another way you can look into, try binding your device to the controls for the SL AU plugin from within Live, the Record (cmd), should change their state when recording is active or not and maybe you can get Live to send out a midi CC when it changes (which SL does internally). I'll give it a try later if you don't have luck....


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FOR REFERENCE ONLY, not so useful.

You need to pick a unique port in osculator for the input (lets call it YOURPORT for the command below). Then, the tricky part, if you look in the SL installation DMG, you'll see a little program called slregister in there. Copy that into your main user directory. Then open a Terminal, and then run:

./slregister localhost YOURPORT 10051

You should start seeing some stuff coming into osculator then, but it doesn't make sense because of the way osculator is designed.

[duhgrantgordon]

Hey so I had no luck with that first option. Not sure if I did it right but I tried just about every midi routing combination I could think of. The 2nd option worked as you said, once I ran ./slregister I was receiving messages in Osculator but they we're pretty much useless as mentioned. I found this program called osc-midi-bridge, I'm not quite sure how it works, it asks for an osc address pattern which confuses me but everything else seemed pretty straight forward, maybe you can take a look if you have a chance? http://code.google.com/p/osc-midi-bridg ... p&can=2&q=
Thanks again.

-Grant