I’ve had a bit of time now with the Akai APC40, and I’m experimenting with using it in place of my monome 128 / nanoKontrol combination. My previous AV experiments involved a monome-centric plugin called molar – an amazing vst developed by Steve Duda (who also created Lucifer). I wanted to modify the system to use Live-native devices, and found that I could achieve similar results by using Slice-To-Midi and the APC40. Witness below.

Split-Screen

Full-Screen

The basic data flow is this – Sliced Audio Tracks play back samples, and Dummy Tracks listen to their MIDI and pipe it out through a virtual MIDI port. An external video program (Isadora, in this case) reads the incoming MIDI and plays back video in sync.

Ultimately, I think people are going to develop some awesome Live AV plugins via Max4Live. At that points, I can probably scrap this system and use one of theirs. In the meantime, I’m figuring out what it is I want in an AV system so I can pass that along to the real developers.