aum.haa

 

Apologies if I’ve neglected a reply to anyone over the last several weeks. I’ve been a busy bee, making a serious effort to use the downtime provided by this crazy global situation to finish a lot of the personal coding projects I’ve started over the last several years. I’m making good progress, but there’s still a lot to do!

For instance, I’ve had these Novation Launchpads sitting around for ages. When I adopted Ableton’s v2 framework back with Live 9, I made an assumption that they would eventually move their other controllers over to using the new framework as well, or at least start using it to write the newer scripts that they released. How naive of me. Moving mod over to v2 was necessary at the time, since the core needs to be referencing the same base classes as the controller’s main script, and I knew that things at Livid would be slowing down.  I wanted the Livid scripts to have as long a life as possible. 

This didn’t play out well for a lot of the older scripts that I wrote. The Launchpad, for one, got shelved. APC40. Block. (I miss block 🙁 ). The real problem I saw when I made the decisions about the v2 rewrite for all my scripts (and they weren’t made lightly) was that the scripts that were out of my control, the ones I’d merely patched, would need to either be rewritten in v2 (and I wasn’t about to do that) or I’d need to wait for Abes to release the v2 versions of those scripts so I could hack into them.

At some point a couple years ago, I decided to stop waiting. It had been long enough. I got my hands on a couple of the newer Novation Launchpads and started checking out the scripts to see how easy it would be to rewrite them. It was also an excuse to get my hands dirty on some Python, since I’d not spent very much time working with it for a while. I managed to get the Launchpad_MK2 and Launchpad_Pro working with a bit of effort. Then “other stuff” happened. I never got around to testing the scripts.

Cut to two years later, when someone recently asked me about them. I pulled the scripts out of the deep, black box they’ve been hiding in, checked out the scripts…..quite broken now. Because of progress. Because the v2 framework is constantly changing, and I’m constantly having to keep up with it by updating all my scripts that use it. Why did I make that decision towards progress, again? Well, to be honest, I’m glad I did….lots of good stuff in there to work with.  There’s got to be a way to use the original scripts and just hack them a bit, I told myself. Talked myself into.

I spent an evening with the LPMk2 first, and turns out I was able to do just that. In fact, I don’t even need to hack the scripts, I can just override from the Aum256 script, add some goodies to Launchpad_Mk2, and be really careful about how I disconnect when the relationship between the two is over. No need for v2 scripts, no need for constantly fixing broken scripts (probably….hopefully), and its moving in the direction I’ve already been considering (using Aum256 as a hub/server script with it’s own iOS app).

Another evening with the LPPro had good results. I was also able to get the original Launchpad script to work with this scheme. So now I just need a couple of the newer Launchpads to work with and I can get the whole Novation family going 😉

There’s still a need for some renewed documentation of all this stuff.  Most of the older docs on the wiki site are hopelessly out of date.  

So I’ve added the new overrides to the m4m8 repository, if any of you out there are still around that remember how to use the monomodular stuff, it works basically the same way it already has.  The only difference is that now, instead of needing custom Novation scripts from aumhaa, it’s only necessary to load the official Ableton script and an instance of Aum256.  This will override one of the User pages on the Launchpad (or utilize an extra mode on the Notes page of the Launchpad Pro).  You can have multiple controllers hooked up all with different instances of modHandler in the connected controllers, and it only requires a single instance of Aum256.  The plan is to have Aum256 host an iPad app which will provide additional controls, visualization, and configuration mechanisms for its conjoined controllers and the mods they are connected to.  

I’ve also reintroduced some of the earliest mods I wrote or ported, including the Aumboids and Aumlife patches.  Documentation will follow, but in the meantime if anyone is interested in trying things out just drop me a note and I can get you started with the basic info.

Enjoy the apocalypse, and don’t forget to wash your hands!

a

 

~ by amounra on June 3, 2020.

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