November 16, 2013
So you’ve made some animations with the Quneo Pad Animator and now you’re playing them back in Ableton. Due to the way Ableton deals with MIDI clips If you want to play more than one animation at a time you can’t do it unless you combine clips or use separate channels. And what if you want to fire off clips rapidly? It can get overly complex for something that should be simple. Here’s an easy and effective solution that serendipitously has many applications outside of the Quneo universe though it was originally intended for the exact purpose of firing off the .mid files that the online Quneo Pad Animator creates. The MIDI File One Shotter is a Max for Live “midi effect” that allows you to drag and drop .mid files onto a keyboard and trigger them with Note-On/Note-Off messages. This way you can have multiple animations laid out on a keyboard and fire them off any way you see fit at any moment without worrying about creating new animations that are combinations of other animations. As a side effect this device allows you to fire off .mid files for anything, really. So you can store beat loops or keyboard flourishes or… anything .mid you want can be fired off! One hint/warning, if the device is in “loop” mode you will probably want a .mid file that has a note or a message that ends on the last tick. Max has no way of knowing how long of a rest there is supposed to be at the end of a clip and the information is not embedded into MID0 type files. So when Max reaches the last bit of information it starts the clip over. This isn’t really an huge issue (since you can simply do the “play once” mode and re-trigger) but something you should be aware of.
Max’s “seq” object behaves slightly differently in Max for Live than is does in Max. Because of this “feature”, if you are using the online QuNeo Pad Animator to make LED clips it will NOT play them in their directly downloaded form. You should drop them into an Ableton clip slot and then “Export MIDI clip…” which is fine, I guess, because you get to do a little edit and rename them… But otherwise it WILL NOT play the downloaded file.
