Liine has released a free Max For Live device, Kapture, that was originally created for Richie Hawtin‘s Plastikman Live tour.
The sounds and sonic signatures in Plastikman Live are heavily reliant on complex configurations of sends, returns and feedback loops, as well as combinations of instrument and effect parameters. Liine’s challenge was to build a system to manage this huge number of parameters in a live scenario.
Kapture is the solution that they came up with. Similar to a preset management system for the whole of Ableton Live, it lets you “Kapture” the state of your set.
Here’s what the developers have to say about Kapture:
We’re now very glad to be able to release it to the public and to see how other people use it in performances and in the studio. Kapture is not a polished mainstream product but something developed for a very specific show. However, we think that it’s something that many people will find very useful if they are willing to get their hands a little dirty and tweak it to fit their setup.
We aim to continue releasing bits and pieces like this from the Liine Laboratory, more rough and ready experimental/custom devices and works in progress, alongside the polished, premium products such as Griid.
Kapture requires Ableton Live 8 and Max For Live.
If you try out Kapture, leave a comment with your thoughts!
I've looked into the patch because I was interested in the way they set this up. The patch itself looks pretty decent, the programming in the patch also looks quite good. Not a chaotic bunch of patch cords but instead a good use of space with easy to follow patch cords.
However, I can't comment on how the patch works because I'm not going there. I'd also advice others not to do so. This is because of a bug in the javascript file.
You can quickly see this yourself after you pull in the patch, right click on the title bar and use "show max window". Over here it gives me a syntax error and a comment that the 'init' function cannot be found.
When I opened the javascript I think I found the possible problem; a large bunch of high ascii values. Since these start to appear somewhere in the init function I can understand why M4L doesn't grok this. And Windows wordpad nor my Netbeans environment can make much out of this file either.
So… Since this can result in unexpected behavior I'd advice people not to go here as of yet. Although I suspect that Mac users may not suffer from this yet obviously I'm not sure there.
The JavaScript file ist UTF-8 coded. From your comment I thought that maybe it was UTF-16 (which would be strange enough). You should have no problem reading this file. This has nothing to do with Mac vs. Windows as the characters the JavaScript file uses are all 7-bit ASCII compatible. I could not reproduce this problem on Windows XP's Wordpad either …
Windows support has been fixed.
Kapture 1.0.1 available on http://liine.net/griid/en/kapture.html