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Setbacks

Ableton released a new version of Live today, version 9.13. Some of you unwittingly already have it due to the wonderful “autoupdate” feature of Live 9. Many of you that use non-Ableton-endorsed remote scripts (like mine) are wishing right now that you had known that it was possible to turn this wonderful autoupdate functionality off in Live’s preferences…..

I found out last week, just as I was finishing up work on the hex mod for Codec, that there were some problems with our scripts in the new beta build of Live, which was the release candidate that would become their official release today. My first reaction was, hrmphhh. Whatever. Then I looked a little deeper. And then I started to get uncontrollably depressed. They’d done it again….screwed everything up. Before I’d even properly recovered from the last major release. C’mon, guys, really???

Besides changing a bunch of arbitrary things that really didn’t need to be touched (which are easily fixed, but irritating all the same, and basically makes it impossible to have cohesive scripts that work in more than a single subrelease of Live), they “fixed” a bug that had been present since the introduction of Live 9, even back in the prelease betas.

That bug, which caused Live’s Python engine to completely disconnect and reload all it’s Python scripts every time one was inserted or removed, had actually been the cause of much elation on my part when Live 9 was first released. Why? Why am I so excited about a bug? Well, basically, because it fixed another problem that Ableton or Cycling had never taken the time to address: there is no implementation for a way to be notified in m4l that a Python script has been added or removed from Live’s preferences. It’s kind of a big deal: if I load an m4l patch in Live, and that patch is expected to connect to a particular control surface script, but the script isn’t currently loaded in Live’s prefs, then it can’t connect. But since there’s no way for us to bump the patch when a change has been made to Live’s prefs, the only way we can ever connect is to have the patch sit there and poll the LOM over and over until one finally appears. This is very undesirable, epecially considering it would be VERY doable to implement something on their end to deal with this. ControlSurface.connect_script_instances() is called every time Live’s preferences change, so there’s already hook in place….it’s just never been implemented.

Another irritating coincidence of the “bugfix” was that my Debugger was no longer capable of invoking a complete reload() of all the Python modules in a running instance of Live, which means that every time I edit a script I have to completely restart Live in order to check the change. This, of course, means development time is greatly increased (as well as my blood pressure, I’m afraid).

Bottom line: instead of finishing up all the mods for the ALREADY COMPLETED 9.12 scripts this week, I had to back up and completely rewrite my connection routines for mods, make a bunch of bugfixes for general Python incompatibilities, and rewrite my Debug script from scratch. Happily, I’m pretty much done with that at this point….but I thought I’d mention it…since…its….taking….so….freaking….long.

Back on track, maybe we’ll git’r’dun this weekend. Thanks for your support 😉

a

~ by amounra on July 3, 2014.

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7 Responses to “Setbacks”

  1. Don’t worry I think we all understand, this must be hard for you to almost get near the end and then get another kick in the back by mister Ableton.

    Hope you will get there soon and also hope that Abes is not going to play one of these tricks again, because also for us producers and performers it is a pain in the a** to replace midi remote script after midi remote script every now and then.

    By the way I found out that the Livid steppers are not working correctly anymore, the step buttons on the upper mute 16 buttons (specifically no. 13, 14, 15 and 16 in the drumsteppr device) are acting weird with the feedback go the lights, you have to constantly switch out and then back into the mod to update the feedback again, but once you press one of these buttons again the same thing happens.

    You might want to look at this.

    • I knew about this, another user hipped me to it last week or so….I’ve fixed it in the most current build for 9.13 as far as I can tell….however, there might be some other problems with them now, so please keep me updated. I’m testing stuff as quickly as possible, but trying to give precedence to the b996 stuff since its almost finished already anyway. As far as I can tell, the old stepprs should work with the NEW stock Livid scripts (which we haven’t posted the installer for yet, but we’re working on it, and you can download the working versions from my repo: they’re in the “Livid Python Scripts” folder), but there may be some connection issues and other weird things that I haven’t found yet since the introduction of Ableton’s new “bug fix” for the Control Surfaces reinitialization scheme. Thanks for the heads up, though….let me know what you find out with the new scripts.

      a

  2. Hi Amounra,

    The new Livid scripts are installing the remote scripts, but they install them as hidden files. I am on a Macbook 15″ late 2012 with OSX Mavericks and I tried it yesterday, without any luck. After getting stuck and stumbled why I couldn’t see any Livid remote scripts after installing, I decided to download the ones from the monomodular github and manually install them. As soon as I copied the script to the remote script folder in Ableton it said that it couldn’t be replaced, because the files was hidden. After that I used the terminal.app to show my hidden files, deleted the livid scripts manually and installed the ones from the monomodular github. It all seems to work now, but you might want to take a look at it, because I’m sure you will get some people asking about it. There is already one that opened a new discussion on the Livid forum.

    • Thanks for the heads up! There’s also some problems for Windows users I’m afraid….hopefully I can get Peter to make a new installer tomorrow that will solve these problems. Please let me know if you find any bugs….I’m still sifting through things. Cheers!

      a

  3. Hi Amounra, I saw that you changed something in the Livid scripts for the faders and knobs, but they are still mapped to the controls as in the main page in the mod modes. I am not a programmer, but have used the info in one of the discussions on the Livid forums to make the changes for my own needs. It seems that there are sentences that is different from the part discussed on the Livid forum. The first one is: ‘if FADER_BANKING:’ and the other is: ‘if DIAL_BANKING:’

    Without these sentences it seems to work for me. Can you tell me what the purpose is for these sentences? (Just to know what they do)

  4. Hi Amounra,

    So frustrating for you! I’ve found my way here, and I’m glad I did – not just for the insight into the remote scripts but am also digging the Ambient Soup! I’ve just purchased an Electrix Tweaker, it arrived this weekend – just in time to be updated out of the game! I was lucky enough to see it working well on my older macbook, so am massively impressed by the implementation! Before I found this blog, I have emailed Electrix, Livid and Ableton. I’m hoping to get an older Live install to continue working. I suppose my question is, will you be updating the script for this device? I’ve tried the latest scripts and it’s a showstopper sadly on 9.1.4… Thanks again for a seriously comprehensive remote, and I look forward to working with it again soon!

    A

    • Thanks for the kind words! Soup is my “alpha-test” arena for all this stuff, you never know what’s going to happen 🙂 There’s a lot of stuff in that directory that’s not posted, so you might want to dig around in there, as there’s a lot of more recent stuff that doesn’t have an entry on the webpage:

      https://aumhaa.com/artisia/artisia/Media/

      Yeah, unfortunately I haven’t been able to update the Tweaker for the most current Live version. I think it will probably work with anything before Live 9.12, but I’m not completely certain. AFAIK, I won’t be updating it anytime soon. It was built originally for Live 8. Probably won’t do you any good to contact Ableton, but I would recommend getting in touch with Electrix. Unfortunately its currently out of my hands. I had to do a bunch of very tricky stuff in Python to get it working right in the first place, and unfortunately newer versions of Live have broken that functionality. I think I removed the main problems that caused it to not load and those versions are in Livid’s github repository, but that doesn’t fix broken functionality:

      https://github.com/LividInstruments/LiveRemoteScripts

      a

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