nckn.music.

Recently I read Peter Kirn’s (CreateDigitalMusic) good tutorial on User Remote Scripting in Ableton Live. It’s a tiny text-file that you put into a folder inside of Ableton’s Preferences-directory. This way you have the possibility to store Midi-Mapping Defaults and to gain some automapping-niceness.

I don’t want to go into detail, because the article is pretty much everything you should read to get started. However, if you’re like me you read some introducing paragraphs, then thinking: “Oh, I don’t need to read all of this, guess i can get started right by fiddling myself”. And then it does not work. Argh! I lost 2 hours of my life trying to get to the mistake. After finding the solution I thought I share it, for you to not get into the same trouble…

My mistake: I overlooked, that in the Config-file Midi-channels are counted from 0-15 (as in Arrays). My desired Channel was 9, so I typed 9. Program translated this to Channel 10, so in Live there was no signal on Channel 10. Rule: always type in your channel minus one.

Another possible mistake Peter hinted: Putting the files into the wrong directory.
On the mac the config-file goes into ~/Library/Preferences/Ableton/[your version]/User Remote Scripts/[your Presetname]/UserConfiguration.txt
Windows: [Windows boot drive]/Users/ [your Username]/AppData/Roaming/Ableton/[your version]/Preferences/User Remote Scripts/[your Presetname]/UserConfiguration.txt

Now, that you have everything working, enjoy your newly gained control. For example control all your Instrument- and Drum-racks with only 8 Midi-mappings. Just select the rack’s title bar and the knobs are automatically assigned, as long as you see the blue hand. Nice.

Tags: ableton live, channel, config, midi, racks, scripting, solution