Hi, Look at SooperLooper. That has a lot of good features, and is in my experience very stable usuable software. All controls are map-able by MIDI & OSC, and it all works :-)

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Harry Van Haaren <harryhaaren(a)gmail.com> wrote: for this sort of setup, freewheeling is really much more suitable, i think.

Hey! I did actually do quite some controllerism, not with Live but with Dj Traktor Studio. All my experiments on Linux showed that there is no reliable way to get close to Moldover's level without using a proprietary app, designed especially for that. If you use something that was not, you will end up having trouble doing some basic operations. In fact, I had to spend quite a lot of time with Traktor, to figure out the best mapping for Traktor to suit my needs, just like Moldover had to work a lot at his method until he came up with what he did. Sooperlooper seems like the most elaborate tool on Linux in terms of being midified, however a simple fact that it does not display the name of the file you load makes it almost impossible to use in a controllerism performance. Cyclone looks more promising (http://toxic.cubicarea.it/cyclone) but I haven't tried it. Freewheeling I also did not try - I mean, I did a long time ago and it didn't cut it, but I do not remember the reason.

Anyway, do you have any controllerism experience?

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Renato <rennabh(a)gmail.com> wrote: please, don't say stuff like this. it only acts as encouragement for the people who can't begin to appreciate something like Shakti without first looping it. i don't want to my kids bringing home the Enigma of their time as shakti layered over a 4/4 house rhythm :) --p

On Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:34:01 +0300 Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote: I started looping things with it time ago, and then left it for sooperlooper. As allready said, I preferred Freewheeling's approach, but it was not maintained and I remember I missed some features well, not yet, but I'm quite inspired by what people like Moldover, Tim Exile and DubFX are doing... I don't have any "real" midi controller but I'm comfortable with getting midi out of arduinos, gamepads and guitar (with rakarrack midi converter) One thing that kind of blocks me is that musically I'm not very accostumed to electronic music, which seems better suited for this kind of thing (It's hard to immagine doing "controllerism" on a tabla sitar and guitar piece from Shakti (what I'm listening to now))

Renato <rennabh(a)gmail.com> writes: SuperCollider, definitely. I haven't done scratching with SC, though, but most of what he's doing is easily done with it, though requires a little time to set up.

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: I understand your point Louigi. OTOH this controllerism-type of thing seems a rather new approach to music, and quite a radical one. All of the artists mentioned in this thread have actually done a lot of work themselves to "bend" equipment and software. If you want to make something similar, I think you should put into account spending much time with design AND technical issues, be it windows or linux anyway, cyclone looks good, I will try it. One thing I want to experiment is using seq24 to control sooperlooper/cyclone

On 11/27/2010 05:57 PM, Renato wrote: Qtractor. Especially now that it has MIDI learn. Best, Jeremy

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 3:24 AM, Jeremy Jongepier <jeremy(a)autostatic.com> wrote: Qtractor is a great piece of software. But if you really think that it can be used the way that Moldover and others use Live, then you just don't understand what they are doing.

On 11/28/10 18:42, Ken Restivo wrote: yes, here's the original announcement with some background info: http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-user/2009-December/065228… > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxlAFG7MA8o

> I found it impressive. He used a Monome as a controller and user interface (i.e.... no need to worry about what SooperLooper does or does not show on screen, for example). I do not remember what tools he used on the back end for handlling the loops. If it's something he coded up himself, perhaps he'd share it. > > -ken > _______________________________________________ > Linux-audio-user mailing list > Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org > http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user

On 11/28/2010 03:21 PM, Paul Davis wrote: thanks Paul, i must confess i do have the same p.o.v. definitely, but (aint't there always a "but"?:) "render unto caesar what is to caesar’s", Jeremy has more than once stretched qtractor possibilities well beyond its creator's bill, if i may call it that way ;)

Yes, me too :) In fact, I tried doing it a year ago. There was no midi learn but I could already assign midi to volume sliders. I tried doing something with that, but... it is not a matter of bending software, it is a matter of being able to do something or not. But we keep saying general things. Let's put it into concrete words. What exactly is needed for controllerism? *Magic couple.* If you do not have beat-matching and auto-sync TOGETHER, then a lot of the things you simply cannot do, no matter how you "bend" the software or "organize" stuff. Most of Moldover's stuff depends on beat-matching and auto-sync - these two extremely important functions, virtually unavailable as a couple in all audio Linux software I have ever used (and I tried out LOTS of software). I would love to be proved wrong as it would mean I missed just the software I need, although I doubt it. I've seen auto-sync in SL, but never saw beat-matching in any of the software on Linux. Both Traktor and Ableton have it, you can look it up as tutorials on YouTube, where you would edit a beat grid over the waveform of a file and make sure it is precise throughout the track and then the system would store your analyzed track for later use and would at a needed moment auto-stretch it to the required tempo and auto-sync it into the mix. So I think that the first step to making controllerism possible on Linux would be to have beat matching together with autosync in one software. * Midi control.* It is obvious and something expected from modern software, but lots and lots of software on Linux has no midi control or has difficulties in that section. Which makes it very difficult for controllerism which requires fluent midi control. So far, I've seen good midi control in SL and LoopDub, although both have their nuances, but many great apps seem very slow to adapt any midi assignment and also, like Qtractor, have unintuitive MIDI learn, at least for now, as it is probably more important for the developers to make functionality available than to make it easy to use (which, of course, is logic difficult to argue with). Rakarrack also has good MIDI learn and can be of use in a modular environment during a controllerism session. * UI.* Finally, it has to be compact and you have got to have the ability to see lots and lots of loops on your screen and be able to name them and organize them. So far, most loopers on Linux have very cumbersome UI, both SL and Kluppe totally fill your screen with 4 loops which is totally unacceptable during a performance when you need to quickly search through a bank of literally dozens of loops. I personally have around 900 loops I use in live performance, from one-shot stuff to drum loops, bass loops, melodical loops and all that other stuff, organized by tempo, key and type. Also ,as I pointed out earlier in discussions, SL gives no filename, so you quickly get lost among already opened loops. SL was simply created with a different workflow in mind - recording loops, rather than loading them from a file. Cyclone seems to be on the right track according to the screenshots in terms of UI, although I have not installed it yet. So there you go, very clear things: 1. Beat matching with autosync. 2. Midi control. 3. Proper user interface. =)

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 01:07:06 +0300 Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> So there you go, very clear things: > 1. Beat matching with autosync. > 2. Midi control. > 3. Proper user interface. >

I was thinking about it today and I reckon that number 1 is non-trivial and currently missing in linux audio - and maybe the only thing that really misses from having something like ableton? It would indeed be great to have this (number 1) in, for example, Ardour and Qtractor

- qtractor is not made for tricks like these but maybe one could use it to trigger Samples that are played on individual tracks in a loop. It even adapts samples if the BPM changes and has lots of other cool features like MIDI-tracks, plugins and a real mixer. One could let the loop run and trigger the idividual samples using mute/solo and do a lot of impressive stuff remote-controlling plugin-parameters. This did not work out so well for me since I failed to make qtractor work with my controller as intended. It appeared quite enigmatic to me how one would map a Key to mute/solo on an individual mixer-track. But basically it seem to work so there is hope to see MIDI-learn as known from Ardour in it...

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:12:08 +0100, Hartmut Noack <zettberlin(a)linuxuse.de> wrote: attotw, qtractor track mute/solo are not subjects to any midi controller mapping, so there's no remote control for those yet, not even on svn trunk, sorry :)

My conclusion: as of now I would not know, how to do the tricks seen in the video under linux...

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 3:24 AM, Jeremy Jongepier <jeremy(a)autostatic.com> wrote: Qtractor is a great piece of software. But if you really think that it can be used the way that Moldover and others use Live, then you just don't understand what they are doing.