garageCube

Hello all. Using an Akai APC40 MKII, and trying to get it to work seamlessly with M8. Bi-directional communication's a problem. I've done a good number of tests with the 2way module from uDart, but starts acting wonky after a short while. Is anyone out there using Ableton Live as a conduit for M8's communication with controller? I tried last night for first time just leaving the Akai box unchecked in M8, going with the IAC Driver (I'm on a souped up MacBook Pro by the way; all softwares updated), but since I'm sort of novice to Ableton Live Suite 9 and its much more extensive midi prefs I'm not sure what combo to choose to possibly facilitate this. Any help greatly appreciated.

I know for certain the Akai supports 2 way. The problem hasn't been so much assigning M8 to Akai and Akai's sliders and knobs affecting M8, I think it's with M8 going BACK to the Akai and updating IT so that there aren't these intolerable jumps when switching layers or god forbid using a mouse to change things...

The OSC module in M8 works pretty well, and I've created OSC control surfaces and they usually stay in sync. It is a first-party module (written by GarageCube) and installed by default.

If I were trying to solve your problem, I'd explore an OSC <-> MIDI bridge. Use OSC to communicate with M8 (because this part basically works out of the box) and MIDI to communicate with AKAI. There are a number of softwares specifically for bridging OSC and MIDI. It could also be built as a PD patch. You might also be able to build it in Ableton or some other general-purpose software that supports both OSC and MIDI.

At some point you were going to have to basically set up a big list of mappings for what M8 keyword corresponds to what MIDI note/CC anyway, right? Depending on what you want to use each Akai control to do. Setting up that big list in an OSC<->MIDI bridge is probably just as easy as any other way to go about it, and it removes M8's weird and inconsistent MIDI support from the equation.