I wasn’t going to talk much about my methods to a commercial developer until I had released everything open source, so I kept mum. At one point the developer-mentioned-above suggested excessive fixes to stability issues and I called them out on their crap template (see the “Any success with oktopush?” thread). Discussions arose where I mentioned my overall disappointment with conventional M4L. In the past couple of weeks I started frequenting the forum again and looking at M4L threads. It was time to release my work and be done with it. It was fun and something I would have loved to have had access to when I was just starting this journey. I had the opportunity to build a simple device for one of the fellow forum members to make the MKII work the way he needed. I went back and forth on what to do but kept coming back to open-sourcing my work. I was a little sour about being called out on by a developer I had not mentioned by name. We emailed back and forth, a veiled accusation of theft arose, and that was that. “Disappointment” was sounded that I had been negative about their work, despite not mentioning them by name. A fellow forums member and developer of the aforementioned template e-mailed me. Within hours of posting the video things went south. I recorded a demo video and posted it online with contact information to get at me. By now I felt confident in what I was doing to provide my template as a product for sale. Life was even better because now I had a newer control surface to run my software with. I ported everything over and took advantage of the RGB buttons to add some more fun to the template. When it arrived in August I had a few days to get it ready for a wedding I was doing that weekend. Ditching the power cable was enough to warrant the upgrade. I was pumped to see the APC40 MKII coming out. It was fast as hell compared to what I had purchased and rock solid stable. I built in everything mentioned in the first paragraph above. I am a long time programmer and using JS to run M4L and my template was the way to go. More importantly, I found the JS object and then I really got to work. I finally found some forum posts and a couple of articles talking about the LiveAPI and access within M4L. I worked on custom remote scripts for the APC40, tried manipulating the MIDI I/O on my computer, and a good bunch of other plugins/templates. This was not working as a solution to utilizing Live in a meaningful fashion for DJ performance. Adding to this were the built-in advertisements and excessive load times. Crashes were prevalent despite updates to the software. Sadly, I quickly discovered that it was unstable. I installed it and began to use it at home and at performances. I stumbled upon a pay template that looked promising. When I began DJing with Ableton and the APC40 a little over a year ago I had no idea what to use. It is fast, lightweight, and crash free to-date (knock on wood). I use it on the regular and am happy with it. It includes momentary effects, fixed clip launch buttons, native looping, effects reset buttons, send toggles, and some workflow enhancements. I’ve put together what I feel to be a pretty good DJ template. It’s the product of a few months of learning the ins and outs of Live and M4L. I’m putting my APC40 MKII template/device up for download.
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