What controller for laptop loopers

["Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill" <rs@moinlabs.de>]

> Most laptop loopers use midi controllers as their interface.  
> Ableton Live is good for this (and the new version ... out 
> soon ... is adding additional functionality in this area).  
> See Kid Beyond for examples.  The problem here is that it's 
> rather complicated to set up.

The way I see it, Live! (at least up to and including major release 5) 
sucks
dick with regard to controller mapping.

Basically, you can assign controllers to specific functions (transport,
mixer, clip editing and also parameters of VSTs if they map them to the
host). There is a MIDI learn feature, and it works well with different
styles of relative controller mappings (and even will recognize them
correctly most of the time), so my experience is that it's easy (although
time-consuming) to set up.

However there are a lot of complaints for me:
1. You can only do a 1:1 mapping, meaning one MIDI source to one function.
2. Only notes and CCs can be used as MIDI sources (no PCs)
3. No scaling or curves for mapping the MIDI source value range (for CCs) 
to
the (continuous) targets
4. For some inexplicable reason, some functions cannot be controlled by
MIDI. Take e.g. the pre/post switches for the auxes.
5. Live! will not differentiate between different MIDI ports. That means
that if you got a MIDI fader box on one MIDI port and a foot controller on
another one, they cannot use cc#1 on ch1 and control different things with
it.
6. Live! will not forward any MIDI messages defined for control to the
tracks.


        Rainer