VIDVOX Forums ~ View topic - Any experience with synching VDMX with ableoton Live?

Video Architect Joined: 09 Apr 2009 Posts: 11

Hi there,

I am trying to put together a vdmx setup to be pretty much controlled from Live for a liveband. I am wondering if anyone ever tried a similar thing and what kind of approach they have chosen?

What I have at the moment is 3 seperate layers which get overlayed and a 4th layer with effects which take the image of the first 3 layers and applies effects to it.
All 4 layers' opacity controls are triggered by midi notes in Live. Then i have X amount of media bins, with each track having one bin with a 4 clips in.

In Live I have 2 midi tracks, one track to select the right media bin to the right track and one track with the arrangements of the 4 midi notes, which trigger the opacity of my 4 layers in VDMX.

Syncing is done over audio/midi setup in osx sending midi notes over a crosswired ethernet cable to the computer running VDMX. Recently we had problems getting the sync to work right, anyone has any experience with that in real life situations? We found it to be unstable. I am not sure what the problem is, but sometimes the triggers to change a layers opacity to 0 or to 100 didn't work, with clips not getting shown. I noticed that especially if I adjusted opacity values by hand the triggers values from midi did get ignored or just stayed at 0.

In general I would be very curious to hear how other people chose to setup their VDMX? My setup also feels a bit too automated at the moment and it would be nice to be able to mix human and machine input a bit more.

*Last edited by dlublin on Tue Mar 23, 2010 4:00 pm; edited 1 time in total*

Hey schnitzelthomas,

We've also found the MIDI over a network option in the Apple AudioMIDI setup to be somewhat unstable. A good idea with a really poor implementation. I would strongly recommend against using it.

As an alternative, try using the handy MIDIviaOSC utility app that Ray put together as one of our opensource projects:
http://code.google.com/p/vvopensource/

This app basically does two things:
1) It will take MIDI, convert it into OSC messages which use the MIDI data type, and send these OSC messages somewhere.

2) If it receives any OSC messages which use the native MIDI-over-OSC data type, it will convert those messages into MIDI messages, and send them to one of the MIDI devices on your system.

This is the first public release of MIDIviaOSC so please let us know if you run into any problems using it.

- David @ VV

ps. MIDIviaOSC is an example app made from using open source OSC and MIDI frameworks that we developed for VDMX. Developers can check out the source code here: http://code.google.com/p/vvopensource/

Video Architect Joined: 09 Apr 2009 Posts: 11

Hey many thanks! Will try this app out this afternoon. Looks great.

Thomas

Video Architect Joined: 27 Aug 2008 Posts: 108

doooooood, thats cool

Video Architect Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 160

wow!.. could this be used to send sync over a wifi network between two machines?

Video Architect Joined: 01 Oct 2007 Posts: 36

Thats a great suprise!

thx again guys!

Hey nobby,

MIDIviaOSC will work over a local wi-fi network and can be used to send any MIDI data including notes, controller values, and clock messages.

It is worth noting that there will likely be lower latency when using a direct wired (ethernet) network connection.

Of course it really only makes sense to use this app if you are working with software that does not natively support OSC. When syncing two copies of VDMX to each other over a network it is better to just use the OSCOutput plugin (this has been possible for quite a while).

- David @ VV

Video Architect Joined: 09 Apr 2009 Posts: 11

Just as feedback,

I tested it quite a bit and used on a gig on Saturday over ethernet and it was really stable. I worked with it on Friday for a couple of hours and sometimes lost the connection, which was each times VDMX fault actually, the MidiOSC app still worked, just VDMX didn't react to the midi messages anymore. This was when working heavily with it, doing changes in Live on one machine, then change stuff in VDMX on another. I then had to close and start VDMX again and the connection was back.

Then as minor improvements which could be done is a way to reopen the window if accidentally closed and a scrolling "preview output" window, bit like a console log on osx.

Great app though, thanks

Video Architect Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 73

I just started using MidiViaOSC to try to transmit osc messages from one machine with Live8 to another with VDMX, both are on the same wifi network. The first few steps went very smoothly, when I open MIDIviaOSC on the ableton machine, it instantly sees the VDMX machine. I can select MIDIviaOSC in ableton as 'Midi to', and when I hit some notes, I see them in the preview section of MIDIviaOSC.

However, back in VDMX, when I turn on the OSCDisplay, I don't see notes. If I open up touchOSC on my iphone and hit some buttons, I can see notes, but nothing from MidiViaOSC. If I open up the osc preferences in VDMX, I do see MidiViaOSC on the other computer show up in the list of output ports.

Anybody know what I am doing wrong?

Video Architect Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 73

Here's some screen grabs of my midiviaosc and ableton setup, and of the sad blank oscdisplay window on the other computer via screensharing.

Video Architect Joined: 10 Jul 2004 Posts: 1093

hi weevil-

you need to launch a copy of MIDIviaOSC on your vdmx machine too, and set up the two copies of MIDIviaOSC to talk to one another. ableton->MIDIviaOSC on computer 1->MIDIviaOSC on computer 2->vdmx.

while the OSC data sent by MIDIviaOSC is technically part of the OSC specification and should work with any application that claims to support OSC, it's an obscure part of the spec: most people don't know that it exists, and most applications- including vdmx- simply ignore it. we'll add support for it to vdmx at some point, but since i'm not aware of a single other piece of hardware or software which is capable of sending/receiving this sort of data it's not much of a priority right now.

: : ray

edit: someone just informed me that osculator supports midi-over-osc; i guess we'll be supporting this in vdmx sooner rather than later!

Video Architect Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 73

Ah, thanks, I'll try that! I had given up and started to hack it out with OSCulator, which was sending notes to VDMX, but when I tried to do HW learn on some media bin clips and then hit a note, I'd get a ton of OSC info that would blanket my media bin slots in ones and zeros Confused

I'll give MIDIViaOSC another try.

Video Architect Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 73

Well, it's working now, but does anyone know if there is a way to send midiviaosc to two different machines? There's only an allowance for one ip address and port in the window. I need to have ableton controlling two vdmx machines. Can I launch two instances of MidiViaOsc somehow and do it that way? or is there a way to pass all the midi being sent from one vdmx machine to another? I see midi output, but i'd only be able to send from data sources, not any of the unused midi from ableton.

If I can't send to two different computers using midiviaosc or osculator, I'm going to have to find someone who knows how to use max4live and build something, I guess...

Video Architect Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 73

If anyone is curious, we ended up working this out by using OSCulator:

http://www.osculator.net/forum/topic/269