Hi everyone,
I’ve tried to solve this issue myself and by looking through the many other similar but slightly different threads but I’ve not found a definitive answer.
Simply, I’d like to hook up Ableton and my OT and have the OT start and stop when I start and stop in Ableton, but I’m having a weird issue… I have the the OT connected to Ableton via my interface with a MIDI cable (out of the interface into the OT), the OT set to receive clock and transport, and in Ableton preference, my interface is set up to send clock and transport to the OT with hardware resync set to ‘stop and start’.
This allows me to play both Ableton and the OT when I hit the spacebar in Ableton - great. However, the issue I’m having is that Ableton only starts the OT and never stops it (i.e., I hit spacebar to start Ableton, they both play, I hit it again and the OT continues until I manually stop it by hitting stop on the OT). Has anyone experienced this before and do you know how to fix it?
Edit: another strange thing occurring; when I hit play in Ableton, both Ableton and the OT play, but the OT plays its loaded sample even when there are no trigs down. Any help would be appreciated.
I’m probably overlooking something simple but it’s driving me crazy because this evening I just wanted to create an interesting lead sound for my song using the OT. 1 hour of troubleshooting later and it looks like I won’t be making music tonight!
Cheers!
I don’t have any hard info for you but you’ll probably need to monitor the midi coming out of ableton and see if it’s sending the stop command when you press the space bar for the second time. You might also try using shift + spacebar to see if it sends a pause message and if the OT reacts to that.
If ableton is sending something other than just “play” on the first press (which is triggering the track sample on the active channel), I would definitely encourage you to look at ableton’s midi output and then, depending on what you observe, try and use some selective midi filtering to severely restrict ableton’s midi output going to the OT down to the bare minimum until you’re able to get the transport issue resolved.
Not sure what else to suggest but someone else who has actually done this with ableton will probably have something to say sooner or later because what I’m giving you is just general, basic troubleshooting.
Good luck
Thanks mate, I appreciate it. Would you recommend any specific midi monitor device/software?
Not really, but I think that there’s a well-regarded max for live midi monitor device. Most are going to be pretty much the same.
If it’s a windows PC you could use MidiOX which is free, or try pocket midi which is supposed to also be simple. Whatever is free should be fine, and if it’s a mac (I don’t use mac so I’ve never used it before) snoize is supposed to be pretty straightforward. I think sysex librarian probably also includes a midi monitor but I’m not 100% sure if it’s integrated or it’s just included in the zip file.
Cheers mate, I’ve found a free one called Midiview so I’ll give this a go. Looks like no stop message is being send for some reason…
Well I’d say that you’ve found your problem, now you’ll just have to track down the culprit.
Always best to narrow down your field of vision like this, otherwise you’re trying to look everywhere at once. Now that you know ableton is the problem you can stop looking at the octatrack, know what I mean?
Ah, I spoke too soon. It is sending off messages, but into itself so I guess some weird midi feedback loop is happening. I’ll figure it out tomorrow lol