LaunchpadSimple

A simple MIDI remote script to use the Novation Launchpad Mini MK3 with Ableton Live

How to install

Prerequisites

• Make sure you have Python 3 installed
• Make sure you have the Python library python-dotenv installed

Preparation

Find out the path to your Ableton Live user library folder. On Windows, this would typically be \Users\[username]\Documents\User Library, on Mac /Users/[username]/Music/Ableton/User Library.

Copy the file .env.example to .env.

Edit the .env file. Change the value of TARGET_DIRECTORY to your user library, suffixed with Remote Scripts\LaunchpadSimple.

• Windows example: TARGET_DIRECTORY="C:\Users\[username]\Documents\User Library\Remote Scripts\LaunchpadSimple"
• Mac example: TARGET_DIRECTORY="/Users/[username]/Music/Ableton/User Library/Remote Scripts/LaunchpadSimple"

Installation

Run the Python script install.py:

python install.py

If everything is set up properly, this will create a new directory LaunchpadSimple in user User Library's Remote Scripts subdirectory and copy over all the relevant files to use this remote script with Ableton Live.

Start Ableton Live.

Open Live's Preferences and go to the Link/MIDI tab.

In the list of Control Surfaces, select LaunchpadSimple and set the input and output port to LPMiniMK3 MIDI.

In the list of MIDI Ports, find the In and Out entries for LaunchpadSimple and tick the boxes Track, Sync and Remote for each.

Development

Logging

The LaunchpadSimple remote script writes log messages to the standard log file of Ableton live. Log messages are prefixed with LS_LOG so that they can be easily found and grepped.

The location of the log file varies between Mac and Windows and also changes with every version update of Ableton Live.

Example for the log file path on a German Windows machine:

• /c/Dokumente\ und\ Einstellungen/wieka/Anwendungsdaten/Ableton/Live\ 11.3.21/Preferences/Log.txt

Assuming the path to the log file is the one from this example, we can view the log output using this command:

tail -f /c/Dokumente\ und\ Einstellungen/wieka/Anwendungsdaten/Ableton/Live\ 11.3.21/Preferences/Log.txt | grep -oG "LS_LOG.*"

Updating

While working on the remote scripts, when you want to test your latest changes in Ableton Live:

• On the command line, run python install.py
• In Live, go to Preferences > Link/MIDI
• In the MIDI remote surfaces list, switch the entry where it says LaunchpadSimple to some other entry in the pulldown menu, then back to LaunchpadSimple