Hi all, brand new to TouchDesigner here - just installed today. Very impressed with its capabilities so far. I perform electronic music on Ableton with live visuals. Previously, I’ve used an Ableton plugin called ‘Zwobot’. It barely works, crashes all the time and hogs all of my processor and GPU resources. Time to look at something more sophisticated and stable - cue TouchDesigner.
So I’ve looked at the the tutorials on linking Ableton to TD: I’ve managed to get Ableton and TD to communicate, and I’ve managed to grasp some of the basics of video manipulation. I’m now struggling to link the two together.
In its most basic sense, what I would ideally want to do would be, while live performing:
Launch a scene in Ableton Session View and have it switch on different videos and effects in TD associated with each scene.
Load different Ableton files without closing Touch Designer - i.e. be able to have a different set of videos and effects for different ableton files, meaning I don’t have to load a new TD project during a live performance, only load different Ableton files, and keep TD running the same project in the background.
If anyone could help me with these two basic things, or point me in the direction of a tutorial that would help me with this, I would be greatly appreciative.
TDAbleton lets you do this very easily. The abletonSong component has callbacks and CHOP channels for when a scene switches. It also lets you name and number your live sets using the TDA_Master device.
Yeah I read about those in the guide, but they’re quite daunting concepts to a NOOB like me. Are there any tutorials which explain to a total beginner how to set them up?
The new TDAbleton install system should be pretty easy to get going. Try following the instructions there. The TDAbletonDemo set that comes with TouchDesigner shows all features working. Once you have the demo going, you can look at sceneTriggerCallbacks in the /project1/Demo/abletonSong1_callbacks DAT. You can also use the song/info/last_started_scene channel in abletonSong1’s output.
Regarding song names and numbers, in your Live set, you can rename the TDA_Master Max device on your master track to give the song a text name. It will show up on the Device/Song Name parameter on the abletonSong1 component. The number is also a setting on that TDA_Master Max device, and will show up in both the Song ID parameter of abletonSong1 and in its output CHOP channel “song/info/song_id”
After you get the demo song going and can see these things changing, let me know if you still need help using those features in your network.
Great those were good pointers, thanks. I’ve got a different path ‘tree’ for each song, with a switch triggered by the song_id parameter. Can’t wait to get stuck in being creative now!