Match Ableton Clip Color to reflect as LED state on MIDI Pads for Akai APC40 MK2
A lot of use on the forum are asking for this feature. We want the Akai APC40 MK2 PADS to light up based on the clip color of the Ableton clip that gets loaded on that PAD.
why did you choose to only go with 3 states for LED feed back? what are you going to implement so that we have LED color matching to clip color on Ableton?
we bought and purchased CSS with the idea that MIDI Mapping would go by a lot faster with your tool you created, so far it’s been more of a hassle trying to get your program to work appropriately mainly because the APC40 has 3 modes like MCBeats has mentioned on multiple forum posts and responses.
MCBeats has even provided the solution to set the modes (giving us a template ready for you to update on your program so that it’s easier on the users to choose between modes (mode 0, 1, and 2).
Hello again,
Here’s a first updated version of the Clip Color Tracker:
- It uses Modifier m19 inside of your custom Session Box position changing Reactions to update the Clip Colors
- It now also updates Clip Colors when you add a new Clip inside the selected empty Clip Slot
I would suggest trying it out into a separate temporary script to see if it works at all with your device. I can’t test APC40 scripts so it’s easy for me to leave in mistakes. I’ve also added some APC40 tags in a few Reactions for my own benefit, so that I wouldn’t overwrite them accidentally (the new “disable” option in CSS3 is proving to be really helpful in this project for me).
There are still things I want to look at or change:
- I noticed, like 5 minutes ago in testing, that the current version doesn’t track Clip Colors well when a closed Group Track is thrown in between the Tracks inside the Session Box. I want to update the next version to ignore the Tracks within a Grouped Track whenever the Group is closed.
- I once came across a image of the 70 colors in Ableton (picture below) where a person had grouped them into sections. I’d like to make an update that, whenever a color_index is used for which there’s no direct counter part on the MIDI Controller, a color out of the same section is used. E.g. In Ableton you’re using pink but your MIDI Controller can’t show pink, then it will use red instead of the default color (default color is usually black and would then only be used as last resort).
- At the moment we’re using up 7 modifiers to track all the changes. I know a way to store changes inside a dictionary which can be stored inside a single modifier. I want to make a version of this project that would only need this one modifier. It would also create less clutter in the list of Mappings. I’ll do this after all the other updates, so that you can select which version you like best.
If you find any bugs or have any other insights or ideas, let me know.
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Small update:
It’s looking good. On my own device (MIDI Fighter Twister) I got the colors to work like I mentioned above. The tracks are now being handled correctly, grouped tracks aren’t a problem anymore. Moving tracks around will now also update the LED’s.
I think I’ll get an APC40 version out somewhere in the next 24 hours. It still might be useful to try out the previous build by then, you might find bugs that I could remove before the next build.
Then I’ll still try to make a version that uses less Modifiers.