Ear candy’s not enough for you – you want that eye candy, too. So we’ve got the latest here for you, as always. New in Videosync for Ableton Live – tons of improvements and an overhauled Simpler visual sampling engine for this Mac-only Ableton Live AV tool.

If you are going to dive into visuals inside Ableton Live, part of the appeal is getting to work with those materials the same way you do with audio. That makes this family of tools compelling even alongside other visual tools, as a quick-jamming addition to your arsenal.

The problem is, making video work the way sound does is already a challenge – let alone in Ableton Live. So it’s encouraging that Showsync put in the time here to overhaul their engine from scratch to fix a number of issues.

In the process, not only do a bunch of bugs disappear, but you now work effectively with Max’s gl3 engine for OpenGL and get less-confusing feedback in the UI.

Also new in this build:

  • Tabula: Pitch Bend Range and UI improvements
  • Visual feedback when the transport is stopped
  • 1080p input device support

1.2.0 release notes in detail:

https://support.showsync.com/release-notes/#/videosync/1.2

Requires macOS and Live 10.1.13 or newer – though Intro+ will do something. (The full Suite or Max for Live license for Live gives you plugin support.) Full Universal Intel/M1/M2 native support.

I figure it’s worth bringing this up partly because I’m curious if folks had luck with this, and how you’re using it – or what tools you prefer.

Also, I do hope that some of these proofs of concept inspire the Ableton and Cycling teams to see if they can make AV functions in Max for Live more intuitive for developers. These tools work, but it’s not hard to imagine some AV widgets evolving over the time the way UI and Live Object Model have. Part of the hack-iness of these solutions is, Live’s UI widgets were not build to do this stuff.

In the meantime, though, these are a lot of fun. Hoping to sit down and finally finish a video or two; let’s see how it goes.

Their “Flowpage” is a nice way to catch up:

https://www.flowcode.com/page/showsyncsoftware

Previously:

https://cdm.link/2022/04/videosync-av-tool-for-ableton-live-adds-more-shaders-and-formats-and-expressive-tools/

Oh yeah, and if this isn’t for you, their tool Beam is very cool – think DMX, ArtNet, lighting fixtures, the lot:

https://beam.showsync.com/download