For years, the criticism of laptops has been about their displays – blue light on your face and that sense that a performer is checking email. But what if the problem isn’t the display, but the location of the display? Because being able to output video to your hardware, while you turn knobs and hit pads, could prove pretty darned useful.
Push 2 video output
And so that makes this latest hack really cool. 60 fps(!) video can now stream over a USB cable to Ableton’s Push 2 hardware. You’ll need some way of creating that video texture, but that’s there in Max for Live’s Jitter objects.
David Butler’s imp.push object, out last week, makes short work of this.
The ingredients that made this possible:
1. Ableton’s API documentation for Push 2, available now on GitHub thanks to Ableton and a lot of hard work by Ralf Suckow.
2. libusb
Learn more at this blog post:
imp.push Beta Released
Get the latest version (or collaborate) at GitHub
Next up on his to-do list – what to do with those RGB pads.
Here’s an impressive video from Cycling ’74 — ask.audio scooped us on this story last week, hat tip to them.
Thanks to Bjorn Vayner for the tip!
Push 2 mappings
And while you’re finding cool stuff to do to expand your Push 2 capabilities, don’t miss this free set of scripts.
Ubermap is a free and open source script for Push 2 designed to let you map VST and AU plug-ins to your Push controller. What’s great about this is that there’s no middle man – nothing like Komplete Kontrol running between you and your plug-in, just direct mapping of parameters. It’s not as powerful or extensive as the Isotonik tool we covered last week, and it’s limited to Push 2 (with some Push 1 support), so you’ll still want to go that route if you fancy using other controller hardware. But the two can be viewed as complementary, particularly as all of this is possible because of Ableton’s API documentation.
You can find the scripts on the Ableton forum:
Ubermap for Push 2 (VST/AU parameter remapping)
There are links there to more documentation and tips on configuration of various plug-ins. Or to grab everything directly, head to GitHub:
Now, let’s hope this paves the way for more native support in future releases of Live, and some sort of interface for doing this in the software without custom scripts. But there’s no reason to wait – these solutions do work now.
Previously:
Ableton just released every last detail of how Push 2 works
You can now access the Push 2 display from Max
Ableton hacks: map anything, even Kontakt and Reaktor