Preserving monome apps for arc and grid

[daeclan]

hello all ~

i spent most of this pandemic relearning how to code (not max/msp but ruby and vue.js) and it reignited my interest in bringing apps and ideas to life (on the monome and the internet).

for the past couple of weeks i have been perusing the forums, trying to get a feel for where my old arc (one of the first 12 ever made!) and my 40h (maybe the last batch ever made!) can fit into a live, creative set up in 2020. i mostly want to play around with MLR, a sequencer, and generative synth applications, but i’d also like to rebuild some of my old apps with the new monome helpers in max.

almost every post i see has a 128, norns or arc 4 as a centerpiece, and i am capital b Broke due to losing my job & reinvesting in the coding bootcamp, so no hardware upgrades for at least a couple years. is there a thread or a resource for people in my position? i really want to see what is still working in 2020, as a lot of the old apps are not optimized for the current max and macOS builds.

i’d love to get lost in a world with my 40h (8x8) and my arc ii, but every time i get the energy to play with 'em, i end up spending 2 hours in this forum & try a max4live patch or two, and then call it a day cos i am discouraged by lack of LED feedback or lack of playability.

the dream is to have something that’d work with ableton live to allow me to record loops live from my guitar or microphone input, and then be able to chop that live input up MLR style, but without a norns. currently i am fooling around with stretta’s gridlab, but that is mostly set up for 128’s and arc 4’s. anything for us half stack boys ?

thanks in advance for ur help
daeclan fka roarbearman

[jasonw22]

Here are norns scripts for that type of grid

Norns Scripts for a 64 Grid

This is intended to be a repository for scripts that people have run using, or modified to use with, a 64 grid. This first post is community editable. Please add scripts as you find/develop them. Less Concepts - @oootini edit MLR - @noiserock & @nitefish edit Zellen Otis - @cfd90 edit Patchwork - monobright 64/128 edit

More general thread:

Monobright 64 ideas

I’ve got a much-loved 2008-era monobright 8x8 monome grid in my studio, but in recent years it’s been gathering dust a bit: most (all?) new apps seem to be being made for 16 x 8 varibright grids, and buying a Push has made the grid’s former role controlling Ableton redundant. I’ve tried going back to some of the old classics like flin, or a max4live emulation of a MakeNoise Rene which I made a while back, but these don’t fit into my workflow quite as well as I’d like. I’m feeling a bit stuck fo…

Any help with testing old monome software with old monome hardware and recent operating systems etc, is greatly appreciated.

Test the apps

[andrew]

@daeclan

i’d love to get lost in a world with my 40h (8x8) and my arc ii, but every time i get the energy to play with 'em, i end up spending 2 hours in this forum & try a max4live patch or two, and then call it a day cos i am discouraged by lack of LED feedback or lack of playability.

re: long-term softare support:

I feel your pain here - these are great, totally still useful pieces of hardware but long-term support particularly in max / max for live on top of macOS has been a paint point. maybe the reasons vary but it seems like monome stuff tended to use the weird edge features of this program that don’t get enough support love from higher up proprietary software folks. I’m starting to experience this firsthand with a m4l app I released not much more than a year ago : / it ultimately translates to frustrating / not fun dev time for a script writer that very well may no longer use the tool

not what you came here for but I believe hardware platforms like norns exist in part to alleviate these longevity issues & more or less standardize the experience for all users. if you’re really drawn in this direction and can afford to purge some gear and jump on the norns shield train, I suspect it might be worth it, it’s the future for us (& 64-grid non-varibright support is creeping in for a portion of popular apps - mlr, cheat codes, etc)

there’s still things that work & of course you can jump in & write something for yourself but there’s gonna be issues with software that’s had years of max updates stacked on top of them sadly. re:mix should still be very fun as far as I know - I also wrote some live input mlrthings - but as mentioned - I’m not sure if they’re gonna work right now

[zebra]

@daeclan are you getting any luck at all with basic I/O tests on the devices?

maybe the node.js study would be one thing to try

i doubt there is a particular problem with 40h and arc2; backwards compatibility with older protocols is well supported in all monome drivers. (i still use a 40h with hacked expression inputs - mostly with supercollider on linux/macos, and on norns - and usually bypassing serialosc in favor of raw serial messages.)

i suspect some other kind of setup problem; if nothing is working in node or vanilla max, then maybe a macOS <-> serialosc issue.

in other words:

@daeclan

rebuild some of my old apps with the new monome helpers in max.

that sounds totally achievable. is there a specific issue we can repro/fix?

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if this isn’t a troubleshooting question - I/O is working but you want more things to play with - then i have fewer useful suggestions i guess. most of my work these days (such as it is) is on softcut (MLR “backend”) and norns.

i would be happy to roll a headless MLR for linux computers (based on current norns version) if that is of interest. (realistically, i will not support a macOS build.)

i can’t really speak to ableton / m4l stuff specifically.