"enabler" project....sort of

[dengel]

Well, After years of looking and waiting for an ableton friendly MIDI controller, today I found one. It was unexpected, since technically it is marketed as a "Video Controller"...

The NuVJ from Numark is about as close to a commercial unit as I am likely to get (besides the new Korg mixers) and it only ran me $250 USD. I am hooking it up now; I'll let you know how it goes.

[dengel]

Well, overall the device is quite nice - well built (although the faders feel cheap) and responsive.

My only problem is actually with Ableton itself. For reasons that I fail to understand, I cannot assign loop set-end-out commands per channel. Instead, you have to use a single buttonset, and this set controls whatever track is displaying in track view. for the non-dj, this is great, but i'd like to be able to map the loop controls seperately for each channel. the nudge controls have the same limitation.

because of this, almost any controller, home built or not, can only have a single set of these controls, making it non-dj-like :(.

I think that perhaps running it through an intermediary program that does a midi-macro (IE, when you push nudge on ch1's set of controls, it sends first a command to switch to ch1, THEN, to send a nudge note). The same would work for loops.

But my initial impression is that it is a great controller if you use LIVE like a set of decks with self-mixing records.

[/tilted/]

why add more software?

You could get a midiBox to do what you want to do.

You can program midi commands, so there's no reason why you can't do strings...

[dengel]

That requires building one. I made one, and it got to the prototype stage, but then with my baby I had no time to build anymore - so I need a pre-built solution.

[dengel]

Finally found it again, but it appears that "Bome's MIDI Translator" will do the trick:

http://www.bome.com/midi/translator/download.html