TDAbleton - TouchDesigner Ableton Connection

I just encountered this as well, not sure if its a Max4Live API/Ableton problem though.

Also just wanted to mention, the cuepoint/locator system in Arrangement view is so good for triggering things in TD, but the band i made the lighting system for uses Session view, so currently I think the best way to get the triggers synced up in TD is to count the bars in Ableton like a dweeb and just have TD wait for that specific bar/beat count.

I’ve also done a little addition of my own to convert beats/sixteenths/time into extra channels for eighths and triplets and some other weirder rhythm stuff (3/4 over 4/4? i’m not really sure the correct musical theory terminology for what they do). It’d be cool to share some user-made extended features and hear how everyone uses TDAbleton.

Also, it would be nice, if the popup window, that opens, when the Ableton session is missing the TDA master plugin, would have a cancel button. It can popup, if you switch Ableton sessions, but you don’t necessarily want to create the TDA master plugin…

Hi
love this comp so much - building a big project at the moment - its got lots of track (190+) and a lot of midi going in both directions using tda midis - we started running into issues yesterday and are struggling to trace it - we have begun to not be able to connect

the problem disapears when we delete some tracks but we are finding it impossible to find a pattern - for a while we thought it was a drum rack - but could not reliably reproduce it - then deleting a random track fixed it once - but again we couldn;t trace it -
the closest we are getting to a error message is
‘NoneType’ object is not iterable -
i’ve attached a picture - project goes live next week so this is a bit stressful

need to roll updates to get everything up to latest but thought i’d post in case it raises any immediate thoughts

thanks all for any advice -

b

Edit: Simple mistake, forgot to follow instructions and set the MIDI control interface.

I’m having some connection issues, I’m trying to connect to a fresh install of Ableton 10.0.3 and TouchDesigner 2018.23760 ( I also tried latest but rolled back for testing purposes) Windows 10. The TDableton components are on 1.10.0 in Touch and Ableton.
I can’t seem to get a connection going between the two. I have a similar setup running on another machine that’s using an Ableton Trial
I was thinking it could be a port issue and so I’ve been trying to trouble shoot. 1.10.0 uses port 8000. If I try to ping from TDAbleton op I get nothing back. IfI setup a UDPin in touch listening to port 8000 I can see the pings coming in and if I do a netstat I don’t see anything already using 8000
Also originally I was using TDAbleton 1.14 which is using 8001 so I’m feeling like it’s less of a port issue and maybe something else?

If anyone has any advise on trouble shooting this it would be great.

thanks

While the TDA Master component in your live set was optional in 23760, adding it sometimes sorts out connection issues. As such, new build 2018.25850 now requires it and auto-adds it if it’s missing.
I’d recommend updating to 2018.25850 if you can, there and other small updates wrt ports and in importantly the previous 2018.25000 build had a major TDAbleton update, lots of fixes, which is definitely worth running. Note, it is not backwards compatible because of the all the changes. Remember you need to replace the MIDIRemoteScripts folder contents and the main package component, so give yourself time, not right before a show :open_mouth:

Release Notes

so it seems like our issue (a couple of posts back up ) is one of size - once we get past a certain amount of tracks and data being passed from ableton to td it seems to break the OSC and touch receives an empty string in oscin_callbacksInfo - as soon as we delete a couple of tracks the connection happens again - its hard to tell because the data seems to be coming over chunked but it feels like the formatting of the data coming over is breaking when it gets above a certain amount - doing some debugging today in case its a hardware issue but failing that would there be a way to increase the size of transferable data?

running latest versions of everything -

thanks

ben

fixed our connection issues by building a filter into the TDA.py to only send info and data from tracks with a specific prefix in the track name - this streamlines everything massively reduces the amount of data being sent and its all working together again

b

Sorry for slow reply. For some reason I haven’t been getting notifications on this thread!

Looking into all issues posted since last update.

@benflock if you can share your set that breaks it would be a great help. Don’t need audio data. Send to ivan@derivative.ca

Uploaded 1.15.0 to top of thread

  • Fixed bug with duplicate scene names only showing one scene
  • Added Cancel button to TDA Master warning dialog

Backwards compatibility warning: SongInfo[‘scenes’] is now a list instead of a dictionary indexed by name.

@benflock: the issue you reported is larger and will probably have to wait until TD 40k is released. I haven’t been able to duplicate the problem, but I plan on building in a Track filtering mechanism like the one you hacked into TDA.py…

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

Hey Ivan

thanks - sorry for slow reply - show opens tomorrow so will have time to upload the set for you to replicate later in the week

b

Not sure if this is a legit error or just ableton stupidity,

but if there’s a scene without a name, you get the error:

line 18, in onTableChange SystemError: error return without exception set

also, are you able to connect to another computer on the network running ableton? I thought i tested it before and was able to, but using 1.15.0 gives the error that i can’t connect.

Important - TD build 26450 has an issue that breaks TDAbleton. Will be fixed soon!

Bunch of bug fixes released in 1.15.1 (at top of thread). Thanks to everyone that has reported issues.

  • Max issue - Macro numbers are no longer mixed up
  • Max issue - deleting or adding tracks no longer breaks connection with TDA devices
  • Max issue - TDA Rack devices have accurate help on “OUT” buttons
  • Adding cue points no longer causes textport error spam
  • Empty scene names no longer cause errors

I’ve heard people are having some trouble connecting, possibly due to new default of OSC port 8001 instead of 8000. Make sure your tdAbleton component and TDA_Master Live device have matching settings. If at first you don’t connect, try a couple different ports. If you still have problems, do post here!

Hello! The information that arrives from Ableton to TD without problems. But not from TD to Ableton. For example, when trying to change the volume of a track. Any ideas?

What TD build are you using? 26450 has a problem that will be resolved in next release.

ok rolling back to 25850

i noticed an error in 1.15.1 though.

It’s on “chopexec_scrubWhenStopped” (Chop Execute) in the AbletonSong COMP. It’s points to an absolute reference, when it could just be a relative one (since the CHOP is references is right next to it). I noticed this because my top-level/parent container wasn’t named project1 and i got an error.

@why: yikes, thank you. Will be fixed in 1.15.2

Uploaded TDAbleton 1.16.0

  • Fixes bad reference in chopexec_scrubWhenStopped
  • abletonSong now has song Loop Start and Loop Length controls/watchers
  • abletonSong now has onLoopStartPassed callback

Anyone know of a good way to render non-realtime TDAbleton controlled content?
Say for example if I wanted to render a video from Touchdesigner with realtime turned off, which slows touchdesigner so it can render every frame, as opposed to skipping frames, and have that slow down the TDAbleton connection as well so the content syncs up properly.

In an ideal setup, I would like to send OSC messages to Ableton to advance to the next frame. OR have some kind of midi clock sync going on. Any ideas?

hi spaghetti -

Are you controlling Ableton with TouchDesigner or do you have controls from Ableton sending into TD?

I recently completed a music video where I had written a bunch of automation in Ableton that was controlling parts of my TD patch. The way I made the offline render was to do a play-through of the song with Realtime turned on in TD to capture all the automation into a Record CHOP. Then, when I was doing the non-realtime rendering, I looked up the channel values based on the current frame of the timeline.

Is that the pipeline you would need?

Ableton doesn’t have a concept of frames, so I’m not sure how “advancing the frame in Ableton” would work. You could advance the playhead position by the amount of time that would elapse in a frame if you were in realtime mode.