Can TDAbleton receive audio waveforms from ableton or hardware?

I’m curious if its possible to receive audio spectrum data in touchdesigner from tracks in ableton through the TDAbleton package. My goal is to be able to send audio from my hardware synths into ableton to be recorded and send that audio to touchdesigner to react to different frequency ranges. I’d also like to be able to send midi and level data from the ableton project as well. The current issue I’m having is that i can only seem to send midi and level data with the TDAbleton package and if i want audio signals from my synths i can get it using the audio device in chop but using that means I cannot record them in ableton since asio only allows one program to use it at a time

My understanding is that no, you can’t do that directly. A workaround I have used is to also have a copy of the audio track in TD and synchronize starts, then do any spectral stuff inside TD.

Ivan can explain more…the creator of TDAbleton.

I see, so having it react to actual audio while i play live isnt really an option aside from the level data from TDableton. I havent really explored the TD ableton racks much but is it possible to have multiple TDAbleton levels on a rack that splits up the audio by frequency? so i could at least get different data based on audio that way?

Yes and that is the preferred way as it is more tunable and flexible with something like EQ8. But you won’t be able to transfer a full spectrum from Ableton - ie FFT like audioSpectrum CHOP.

Gotcha okay thank you I’ll be sure to dive more into those then. I’m curious if the reason there hasn’t been a TDAbleton device specifically for audio spectrums is because of issues with asio

I think it is because TDA mimics Push2 control and is just not designed to send high bandwidth audio over IP. In my limited tests with ASIO I found the latency horrible. Is that your experience too? If your visuals are not super complicated you can run both Live and TD on the same machine which makes keeping audio in sync a whole lot easier.

Ivan has a good intro to TDAbleton here if you have not seen it…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ref56jIJ5qo

I honestly havent done enough testing to notice any latency yet but I dont doubt it. currently my projects are very simple so i can run both programs on my pc. that is good to know going forward

Ok good luck! And have fun!

1 Like