2005 Ableton to 2015 Avenue

"Where is Feature X? I need Feature X! How can you not have Feature X?"
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tobyspark
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon Aug 12, 2013 16:48

2005 Ableton to 2015 Avenue

Post by tobyspark »

phpBB [video]


I picked up Avenue to see how a 2015 software could cope with an audio-visual piece made ten years ago. On the plus, the one application makes the whole endeavour much simpler, or the minus, there's still some ways for Avenue to go. The video above was made to send direct to Resolume, it's me working through what I hit and the workarounds I had to make a few days after the gig. But there's no reason for it to be private, and it would be interesting to see if anybody else has worked around things in other ways etc.

I think I've got down below the feature requests that come up.

Next button: I know Avenue has no concept of current column (there's no state there), but an advance to next column trigger I could map to a hardware button would free me up when performing.

Set BPM from a column trigger, with beat snap. This could be by entering 'xxx BPM' as column name and that gets picked up by Avenue, as per Ableton.

Or... implement that in a powerfully generic way: have 'OSC Clip', a clip or effect configurable with a custom OSC message, ie. text field plus parameter field for different types.

Time-strech audio. Avenue has Ableton's session view. The other half of Ableton's core offer is elastic audio, ie. time-stretching to the tempo. If Avenue is to be a proper audio-visual app, for me it also has to have time-stretching along with the session view. Sure, it's some advanced DSP, but ya' know...

Built-in Reverb VST effect. As was told to me, and as panned out when I went to make an audio-visual piece, for basic sound design you need an EQ, Reverb and delay. Avenue's EQ didn't work for me, but the High and Low-pass did, with their resonance parameter. But I couldn't find any Reverb or Echo fx that got me anywhere near what I'd easily had in Ableton. I wasted a lot of prep time on this.

Built-in Echo/Delay VST effect. See above.

GLSL Shader source that can accept any number of sources. Let me supply the shader, and then in Avenue assign layers to it's inputs. This will get round the limitations of the sequential layer-by-layer rendering approach of Avenue. Vidvox's "Interactive Shader Format" is a sane approach here, but the base requirement in Avenue is to have an effect format that you can assign an arbitrary number of sources to, not just the 'stack' beneath it.

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