Features

Selection and transforms

A block is not a rectangle but a passage: it starts at one field and ends at another, following reading order — NOTE, LEN, VEL, the three effect fields, then the next channel. Dragging down the VEL column takes velocities and leaves the notes alone; dragging across channels takes everything in between.

Double-click takes the column

Two clicks anywhere in the same column of the same channel select it over the full height. It works for each of the seven fields.

The Generate panel

Everything that draws or moves a block’s contents goes through one panel, opened with Generate… in the context menu. It carries the four modes, and beside them the scale, the beats, the density and the octaves. It opens next to your selection so as not to hide it, and stays where you drag it; the options a mode does not use are greyed. Shift+R rolls again with those settings without opening it — set it once, then roll from the keyboard as often as you like. Every roll is undone with Shift+Z, and the settings travel with the Set.

• Random fills the block with drawn content, rhythm included.
• Re-pitch gives every note another pitch and touches nothing else: place, length, velocity and command all stay.
• Shuffle redistributes the block’s rows at random, losing nothing and inventing nothing. Empty rows move like the others, so the rhythm changes.
• Permute trades only the rows that carry a note: the hits stay where they are and only what is played changes order.

A draw tuned to be listenable

• Pitches follow the Set's scale. Live 12 keeps the current root and intervals on the song; Random reads them and moves any stray note to the nearest one that fits. There is no scale table inside the device, so a scale added to Live works here the day it appears.
• Beats are favoured. Rows that land on a beat get the full density, the others its square — which is what separates a phrase from a hedge.
• A row is written whole or not at all: never a velocity without a note.
• In the FX column the parameter is drawn, never the letter. A speed change or a jump drawn at random is not a variation, it is a different piece.
• Drawn values are always playable: never out of range, never a glissando step wider than the interval, never arpeggio shape zero.
• With nothing selected, the draw applies to the single field under the cursor — the fastest way to reroll one value.

All of it works with the mouse too

The two complete each other more than they replace each other. The keyboard is unbeatable for writing — you type without aiming. The mouse is better at pointing: landing twenty rows away without counting, taking a block you have in front of you, reaching a command without remembering its shortcut.

Nothing is reserved to one or the other, and moving between them takes no ceremony: the keyboard comes back to the grid as soon as the pointer enters it, with no click, so the current selection survives. The context menu carries most of the transforms, which lets you work a block with no keyboard at all — handy when Live is holding it.

Export to a clip

Select a clip slot in Live, press EXPORT. The clip is created at the length of the pattern and filled with the notes; if a clip was already there it is kept and only its notes are replaced — which matters, because destroying a recorded clip would throw away the only copy of its envelopes.

• Sxxx shifts every row that follows, and the clip length accounts for it.
• Jxxx is unrolled: the path actually taken is written, skipped rows are not, and writing stops the moment a row would come up twice.
• Dxxx delays the note inside its own row.
• Axxx and Rxxy are written as the notes they make you hear.
• Vxxx feeds the written velocity.
• Muted channels — and channels silenced by someone else's solo — are not written. What you hear is what you export.

One channel at a time

Channel to clip, in the context menu, exports only the channel under the cursor. A Live clip has no notion of MIDI channel, so this is the honest way to send each channel to its own track — and each MaxTracker Receiver has an Export button that does exactly this for the channels it is listening to.

A note with no LEN lasts until the next one

That is what an empty LEN has always meant, and the clip shows it: two rows apart at 1/16 gives an eighth note, one row gives a sixteenth. Where two notes of the same pitch follow one another, the first is shortened by a sixteenth of a tick — under a millisecond — so they do not quite touch. Without it Live merges them into one long note and the second attack disappears, though you hear it in the pattern. Different pitches are never separated.

Coming back to row 00

On the return to row 00 the tracker stops what has no length and lets what has one finish. A note with no LEN holds until something claims its channel, and nothing does on the other side of the loop, so row 00 acts as a === on every channel. A note with a LEN runs its full length even when that overruns into the next pass. The clip is the one place where what you hear and what you export part company: a Live clip has one pass and cannot say "and it carries on", so the overrunning tail is not written. If you want to keep that held note, one more row before the end writes it down in black and white.

Two editions

The free edition is the same program, with a smaller grid and without the companion device. Not a demo that expires, not a nag screen, not a silence after an hour: it saves with your Set and renders exactly like the full one, for as long as you keep it.

What really separates them: the Receiver

Without the Receiver, the four channels of the Lite edition all reach the same instrument. It is a four-voice figure for one sound, one bar long. The full edition is eight voices over four bars, each voice on its own track, with its own instrument and its own effects — and as many trackers in the Set as you want — since 1.1, only one free tracker sounds per Set, the others open and edit but stay silent. That is the difference between the two, and it is a difference of kind rather than of size.

Your patterns come with you

A pattern lives inside the device that wrote it, so buying the full edition does not move your work across on its own. The clipboard is shared between every MaxTracker open in the Set: select all with Shift+A in the Lite, copy with Shift+C, paste into the full one with Shift+V. Nothing to export, nothing to import, and the effects travel with the notes.

What changes between the two →