Description

Hello everyone,

I'm proud to share a device I've been working on for quite a while now with you all. Timestretch Looper is an audio looper quite similar to the one you find built into Live. That's not a mistake, I like Live's Looper, but found it missing some functionality.

Timestretch Looper does "sound on sound" recording, but also incorporates:

- Timestretching. Independent speed, and pitch control, like Live's clips, but unlike Live's looper.

- "Multiply" functionality for destructively changing the lengths of clips.

- OSC input and output for controlling and monitoring any parameter of the device.

I have seen a lot of people trying to make loopers from scratch with MaxMSP and perhaps spending a lot of time having to reinvent the wheel, so I've done my best to make the code clean, well documented, and easy to modify. I hope this is a helpful starting point and perhaps a good example of clean Max programming practices.

I'm very interested in having you modify the code if you'd like, and perhaps contribute to working out a few of the persistent bugs that are noted in the Readme doc embedded within the device. I give complete permission to use this device, modify it, and even reupload modified versions. I've also created a github page for those that are interested https://github.com/jesseengel/TimestretchLooper.

Some Performance Notes:

-If the looper is in "Master" mode, and the transport is stopped, the "No Quantize" white text needs to be present to record your first loop, Otherwise it will wait to sync to transport that never starts. The device should set this condition on it's own, but every once in a while you might need to manually reset by pressing "Clear" once.

-Overdubbing on timestretch is unstable. I get around this by having the looper enter "Multiply" mode when timestretching is activated, which means that the second time you press the big button it sets a new length of the loop. This can actually lead to some very cool effects of mangling the orignal sound if you do it several times.

-Due to M4L's limitations on buttons, if you midimap to the big button, you can only have a single behavior. Within the "OSC" tab, however, there is a toggle to map a MIDI CC footswitch to that allows for Long Press "CLEAR" and Double Press "STOP", similar to Live's Looper.

Enjoy!

Update:

v1.1.0: Finally updated device to use groove~ object and not DiracLE~, so it now should work with 64-bit systems, work on both mac and windows, not require downloading from github, just download the device here.