Looking for Ableton to send "play" and "record" message

[chasebowman]

Hello,

I'm working on an Ableton control app for the Microsoft Hololens.  

When a clip is playing or recording in Session View, I want the corresponding hologram to change color.  In order to do this, I would need Ableton to send out a separate message for when a clip is playing or recording.  Currently the best I can come up with is a MIDI note triggered (by a dummy MIDI track) that triggers when the clip is activated, but it cannot discern between play and record.

If I can get an individual MIDI or OSC message for each state, I can send it back into Unity to manipulate the holograms. 

If this makes sense (haha) and someone has done or knows how to do it - I'll be forever grateful.

Thanks!

[Stray]

Welcome to the forum. I would think you'd want to use a control surface script (aka MIDI Remote Script) for that. With one of those, you can associate a MIDI note or CC message with a clip slot and set the velocity/value that should be sent out for the various states of the clip slot and the clip it contains (if any). As an example of how this works, take a look at Session Mode of the Launchpad. Each button in the 8 x 8 matrix controls a clip slot and can reflect the state of the slot. In terms of the states you're interested in, the associated button LED will be green if the clip is playing or red if it's recording. The velocity of the note message sent from the script dictates the color the LED will be.

If you take a look around on Ableton's forum, you'll find various free scripts that you can customize to suit your particular needs. There are also scripts around that use OSC that you might be able to use for this.