CC routing out of the plugin

SP Beta
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Congrats on the Ableton plugin! I’m having a ton of fun with the it and utilizing it in my Ableton workflow with ease.

I do recall the first version being limited in how it could utilize CC messages - is that the case for this version as well?

For example, I’m using SP to send midi notes to a soft synth (and that’s working great). The patch I’ve got going is using the arp function of the synth and I’d love to be able to change that through CC messages from the SP plugin. I know I can do this easily using the standalone software and not the plugin, but if there’s a way to do it with the plugin, that would be ideal :))) thank you!

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Hi @mmmmjjjjjjjj

Glad to hear you’re having fun!

You can send CC’s out of the plugin and into a separate track. However, it is a bit complicated and still involves an IAC bus (I think…but perhaps there is a cleaner way). Here’s a template:

LFO-from-Sensory-to-Wavetable-over-IAC-1.als.zip (26.1 KB)

And here’s a video showing how it’s setup:

You can see that I am sending MIDI from the plugin to a MIDI channel, which in turn is sending it over an IAC bus to another MIDI channel, which has a Wavetable instrument and is receiving the LFO CC on its Frequency Cutoff param.

The extra MIDI channel is a bit redundant, since you could route the IAC directly from the Sensory Percussion channel - that should work without a problem, I just did it this way because that is how the template is setup.

The reason I am using an IAC is because I haven’t figured out how to send CC’s directly from one track to another - I’m not sure if it’s possible. The MIDI Mappings panel seems to be expecting MIDI from external sources only, with no way to add sources from inside the session. I guess the call can’t be coming from inside the house :slight_smile: .

Further, I quickly tested to see if you can take the IAC bus out of play after the mapping has been made (i.e., select the Plugin track as MIDI input after the CC mapping has been created, and de-activate the IAC bus) - this doesn’t seem to work.

So, I could be wrong, but it seems like an IAC bus is required to make this work.

Note: in putting this together, I noticed a small problem with MIDI out of our template. “Post Fade” was selected as the sub input for the "Sensory Percussion 2 MIDI Out channel, when it should have been “Sensory Percussion 2 Beta”. I will fix this and we will re-upload the template soon.

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Awesome, this did the trick, thank you Steven!

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So, this fix has enabled a lot more MIDI control from the plugin, which is awesome! Thank you for that!
However, I’m having MIDI dropouts pretty consistently now. It’ll happen every minute or two, for 3-5 sec. Do you have any ideas what could be causing that?

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Hi Max!

I’m not 100% sure what the culprit could be, but it sounds like a MIDI feedback loop could be happening.

It says here that “sync” should be turned off in most cases: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209774205-Live-s-MIDI-Preferences

It looks like Ableton recommends selecting just “track” for your IAC input, and “remote” for your IAC output. So that might be a good place to start.

CleanShot 2024-03-22 at 11.37.35
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Hi Steven :slight_smile: Thanks for helping me on this one.

While it seemed like that fixed it, it actually cost me the ability to send CC messages out of the plugin (the first issue that brought me here!). If I have “remote” selected as well for the IAC Bus Input, that brings back midi CC, but I’m still experiencing significant interruptions. Not running any other programs and I don’t have any other MIDI devices plugged into my laptop or the Evans Portal, and am using an m1 mac book pro.

Any other ideas?

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Hi Max, no problem at all!

I’ll look into if I can recreate these MIDI dropouts, and if I can come up with a solution for that.

But in puzzling through this, I remembered that Ableton has a M4L pack with devices for controlling their API with MIDI. The pack is free for Ableton suite users, and the device that I think should work for your purposes is called Max API CtrlMIDIcc.amxd.

With this method you wouldn’t need to use an IAC bus. You could route the notes from Sensory to whatever MIDI track is hosting your soft synth, and then route CCs to the params of that soft synth using CntrlMIDIcc.amxd.

Here’s a little template showing how to route a CC to a synth param with CntrlMIDIcc.amxd :

building-tools-API-CC-router-from-sensory Project.zip (87.3 KB)

And here’s a click through video showing the important stuff to get it to work: