#43

Ah excellent, I didn’t realize there’s an argument for floating point numbers from ftom.

edit: I spent a fair amount of time wondering why it wasn’t working before realizing crow.n2v takes numbers not signals… :roll_eyes:

I’ll continue to work on the patch and see if I can get it working. Thanks (again) to both of you for the help!

#44

Is it just me experimenting really glitchy reaction with ^^ins in Ableton ?

#45

hey hey! happy to test – what’s going on? if you can give a list of repro steps, i can look into it

#46

Hey !
I’m sending triangle lfo into CROW In 1 & 2 controlling some filter cutoff and pan knob in Ableton and it’s not smooth at all. It’s making clicky sounds.

#47

I too have an unreliable ^^ins experience. I patch into 1 and 2 of crow, cv and gate from ansible running Kria, I get about 75% of the gates to register in ableton and the cv plays one step behind my grid, like a sample & hold, or its playing on the “falling edge” of the signal or something. I have 2crows, updated firmware, Ableton 10 and the newest max for live patchers, both crows show the same type of latency and missed triggers.

#48

ah, yep. this seems to be what happens when data modulates an audio parameter – same thing happens if you map the built-in LFO MIDI device. I need to find a way to smooth it.

yep, confirmed on my end as well.

apologies for the trouble, both – i need to refactor this patch completely, i think. i’ll have a new version by end of next week.

2 Likes
#49

Thanks @dan_derks for the supersonic answer !
Ok so it’s barely usable with audio parameter ?
No offense but how would you use ^^ins for ?

#50

this generally seems to be a Live + M4L issue: https://cycling74.com/forums/lfo-controlling-ableton-track-pan-clickingpopping. the specific trouble is that the information Max receives from crow is not audio rate, but data rate. so, this is essentially MIDI CC happening super quickly, which Live doesn’t seem to love and I didn’t have the foresight to consider with my patching – I think I need to refactor this to use [live.remote~] rather than [ctlout].

fwiw, ^^ins is an attempt to shoehorn crow into a form it wasn’t really designed for (primarily, that of a DC-coupled audio interface) – but it seemed like a good enough use case that it was worth exploring. apologies for the trouble, both!

my primary test case for ^^ins was to quantize LFOs to musical ranges and modulate non-audio parameters – so things that typically looked for other data, like menus and sliders (eg. the waveshaper on the Wavetable device).

this was all tested working when I did this stream: https://youtu.be/dKMO1Vg0heA?t=1313 (linked specifically to the ‘^^ins modulating stuff’ section)

i’ll have a solution brewed up by friday! if anybody’s up for helping, please lmk! these patches were made using a super old version of crow and they do not take advantage of the many firmware improvements trent’s released.

(pinging @emsahp as i edited the text after posting)

3 Likes
#51

Thanks for looking into this dan, I was scratching my head about the grid/cv latency I was experiencing when trying to sequence ableton. Being able to sequence all the virtual instruments I have via kria would be amazing. No rush, hoping this isn’t a headache to address, your efforts are much appreciated.

2 Likes
#52

Thanks @dan_derks
After updating my crow to version v1.0.3 ^^ins seems more reliable and stable
Most of the time I need to execute ^^c and ^^r in Druid before opening Ableton and M4L for everything to work properly.

I’ve manage to use ^^macros and It’s great fun !!

With ^^outs I’m reporting exactly the same behavior @benjaminz
==> after around ~3 loops of my 1-bar clip that contains modulation of outs 's remote value, my crow becomes unresponsive.

It would be really nice to be able to use ^^outs remote knob as a simple CV recorder in clip-automation mode so we can do super weird shapes and really longue automation sequence !!

2 Likes
#53

glad to hear the update cleared up the ^^ins troubles!

as mentioned in that clip modulation convo, Live is very likely treating clip modulation as audio data, which when funneled through as data to crow is likely too high a resolution to keep things stable. that’s why the LFO MIDI device is way more stable, as that is always “just” MIDI data.

the rest of this week is all crow m4l stuff, so i’ll keep poking at it. i’d really love for this use case to just work, as well :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#54

progress!

here’s a new ^^ins: ^^ins.amxd (1.5 MB)

  • improved stream handling so that you can map cv to audio parameters without anywhere near as much zippering (paging @emsahp) ! (nb. some parameters [like panning and gain] are simply not internally smoothed by Live, so modulation from Max will always cause clicks – I’ve managed to reduce this a lot by incorporating the brilliant jit. smoothing @pATCHES made for Survey)
  • cleaner modes: there’s v/8 + trig (inputs 1 + 2 work together to sequence) and both (inputs 1 and 2 are tracked and can be mapped to any Live parameter).
  • v/8 + trig accurately track v/8 cv data and triggers – this version siiiings, @BKCP!!

as a data point, here’s a clip of two channels of just friends modulating Operator’s filter cutoff + track panning:

I still want to add a ton of mappable buttons, but the core functions are all here. it’d be dope if folks could test to verify:

  • v/8 + trig is fun and working as expected
  • both can get into some nice zones by tuning the d(epth), o(ffset), and s(lew)

:revolving_hearts:!

8 Likes
#55

@dan_derks Thanks so much for tackling this. Ive downloaded the new ^^ins to give it a go, the “both” mode looks to be working perfectly, but v/8 +trig mode doesn’t respond to triggers and cv. The voltage values under 1 & 2 show no change. Going ansible directly into crow 1&2. Tried ^^c and ^^r aswell to make sure the crow was clean. druid shows input 1 and 2 values and it looks like cv is tracking properly, watching the gate values show maybe a 70% chance of changing from 0 or 1, not sure if thats just the refresh rate of druid or something. Im also getting printed to the screen every few minutes. I left the patch cables plugged into crow and tried patching to different cv/trig sources, and interesting enough ^^ins gets a single or sometime small burst of triggers when i touch the cable to the jack another module, but when i plug it in fully it doesn’t respond. Very strange. again the “both” mode seems to work just fine. I have two crows and this behavior is the same for both.

#56

hmm. input 1 v/8 and input 2 triggers?

1 Like
#57

Yes, cv into crow input 1 and gate into crow input 2. coming directly from ansible, both kria and grid, aswell as levels and arc. Two different ansibles, same behavior.
is there a way to check firmware version via druid? Im on the latest, unless it has been updated since I first mentioned this issue in the thread a few days ago.

#58

[SOLVED]
Ok, so if druid is open the crow isnt responsive in ableton. quit druid. CV and triggers work.
wow, this is great, fantastic job @dan_derks! Much appreciated!

1 Like
#59

oh, yes! yeah, the stream gets all wibbly wobbly. thanks for your diligence!

excellent, so glad to hear it all worked out! give it a go for a while, lmk if you run into any weirdness :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
#60

Hi there
Thank a lot @dan_derks for the ^^ins update
Both mode works great and the slewing function is cool

About v/8+trig the docs says :

  • (trig src): identify whether you would like the CV conversion to take place synced to Live’s clock (arpeggiator) or if you’d like the conversion to take place every time a trigger is received through the OTHER input of crow
  • low: set the desired floor for CV-to-MIDI, default is lowest note at 36
  • high set the desired ceiling for CV-to-MIDI, default is highest note at 127

When I’m selecting v/8+trig none of this functions appears in the interface, I’m kind of stuck in both mode visualisation :

Capture d’écran 2020-05-09 à 12.35.33

More globally I must say that each time I’m trying multiple M4L-Crow plugs at the same time, Crow will rapidly freeze.

#61

ah, the docs haven’t been updated as this isn’t officially released — thank you for helping test! hoping to get it out this weekend :slight_smile:. i updated the post above to reflect the new-newest version.

i did forget to add back the low and high stuff, thank you for identifying that! i’ll get it into the device, which should help confirm mode switching.

otherwise, when you select v/8 + trig mode, the interface will largely not change. this is to encourage mapping v/8 data to MIDI CC – modulating a filter cutoff with the pitch data, for example.

i’ve had this bundle running simultaneously for the past 30 minutes without trouble:

  • ^^ins translating both inputs to MIDI CC data, mapped to filter and resonance on Operator
  • ^^dual translating MIDI note data from Arpeggiator to v/8 + triggers
  • ^^jf_synth translating MIDI note data from another instance of Arpeggiator to i2c commands
  • all on separate tracks

please log any reproducible cases here: https://github.com/monome/crow-max-and-m4l/issues and i’ll definitely be able to keep digging.

fwiw, ^^outs is not likely in working order at the moment – so if it’s part of the trouble, i’ll take that one on next! that particular device crosses many of the “is Live handling this as data or audio?” speedbumps – for example, automation envelopes seem to be processed as audio in Live, since they can smoothly manipulate parameters in ways that Max for Live cannot.

#63

bummer, but at least it’s consistent! agree—lots of neat possibilities should it ever become more stable :slight_smile:

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