TDAbleton - fire new clip with updated start time

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

Hello forum,

I’m trying to switch between two clips on the same track in ableton, using TDAbleton. Each clip is 2 bars long, and I want to be able to fire the next clip at the same position that the prior clip was at when it was stopped.

I can’t edit the '‘Loopstart’ parameter on a AbletonClipSlot until it is fired. Is there some lagfree way to do this?

Thanks!
b

2

I’m happy to help with this but it would go faster if you could share what you have right now. Can you send your .als (collect and saved) and .toe to look at, with some instructions on how to find this part? ivan@derivative.ca

Of course you can cut down/remove any large files or stuff you don’t want to share. The more concise the files the better, actually.

3

Email sent, thanks!
For the forum, I have two clips that are two bars of music, 8 beats long, was trying to do something along the lines of:

c1 = op('abletonClipSlot1')
c2 = op('abletonClipSlot2')

clip1_fire = op('abletonClipSlot1').par.Fireclip
clip2_fire = op('abletonClipSlot2').par.Fireclip

location = op('select1')[0] #selects 'playing_position' from clip slot 1
location = math.ceil(location) % 8

clip2_fire.pulse()
c2.par.Loopstart = location

but with setting the second clips start position before it is launched.

4

It might be more fruitful to have both clips on separate channels running in sync and then do a snap fade between the clip and the clip in sync using a volume control. I’m not sure ableton likes changing clip slots non-rhytmically, so i’m not sure a specified start location will work in the start clip functionality… but i could definitely be wrong.

5

Yea im totally thinking about that, but it’d get unwieldy as the number of patterns increase. it shouldn’t be too hard to change a loop’s start position right before firing it. Its an interactive system so I want it to be very responsive, but I can get away with a 1/4 note quantization in ableton so that should be plenty of time to make a change undetected.

6

First pass at this:

Because of latency between the applications, setting the clip start from TD is not going to get you reliably seamless transitions. I am looking for a way within Ableton to make clips maintain the previous clips’ position when they are triggered. Seems like an obvious feature but I’m not finding it so far. Maybe another Live expert on here knows a way to do this.

An alternative would be to use the abletonMIDI component to swap midi notes, assuming you’re planning on using MIDI tracks for your final product.

7

Okay I think I found your answer. Just turn on Legato mode in the clip launch settings for all your clips. Let me know if this works for you.

8

Hi Ivan - Thank you for your help! --Edit: oops, yea this seems to work!-- will report back soon if it doesnt seem right. Thank you!!