openlamp-live — drive your lamps from Ableton Live

Turn a track in Ableton Live into a lamp/show controller: clips, macros and automation envelopes drive your OpenLamp smart LED lamps (WLED + Tuya) on the beat, in time with your set — 100 % local, no cloud.

This repo is the Ableton Live frontend of the OpenLamp stack. It doesn't invent a protocol: it speaks the open wled-midi convention (notes → colours, CC → brightness/effects, Program Change → presets, MIDI clock / Ableton Link → on-the-beat) and makes it turnkey inside Live.

Ableton is one way to drive the lamps. The same convention is also spoken by a Stream Deck plugin and any hardware MIDI controller — pick whichever surface fits the moment.

What you can do with it

You program the lights from the same timeline as the music. The beat is the obvious starting point — but it's a floor, not a ceiling.

• 🥁 Visual metronome with a downbeat accent. Every beat pulses the lamps; bar 1 hits brighter and in a different colour. A silent click you see across a loud stage — the band locks in without an in-ear. (Ableton Link / MIDI clock → tempo pulse, phase-accurate accent on the downbeat.)

• 🎭 A lighting cue list built into your set. Warm and dim for the verse, saturated blue for the bridge, a white strobe on the drop — each song section carries its own colour and brightness. Your arrangement is the light show, no separate operator. (One trigger + CC-automation clip per section, laid on the timeline.)

• 📍 Hands-free song-part markers. The lamps change colour at every part boundary — intro → verse → chorus → solo — so everyone on stage sees "we're in the chorus now" without counting bars. Priceless for long-form or improvised sets. (A trigger clip at each section start.)

• ⏺ Record & replay your light performance. Play the lights by hand once — a footswitch for a blackout on the drop, a fader sweeping brightness through the build — while Live records the MIDI. Every show after that replays it note-perfect. (Arm a MIDI track routed to the lamp port; Live captures your moves as automation.)

• 🎛 Sculpt colour live from a MIDI controller. Assign three knobs or faders to hue, saturation and brightness and paint the colour by hand — sweep the hue across the spectrum on a build, desaturate to white on the breakdown, dim on the outro — all in time with what you're playing. With an MPE controller (Push 3, Seaboard) you can go further and shape each lamp's colour per-note. (CC 3 hue + CC 4 saturation + CC 1 brightness, continuous, per group; or the MPE profile.)

• 🎚 Multi-zone staging. Front lamps ride the beat while the back wash holds the section's ambiance — two independent behaviours at once. (Channel-per-target: one Live track and channel per lamp / group.)

• 👆 Whole-rig tempo, one tap. Tap the tempo once and every Ableton Link app and the lamps follow — synths, drum machines and lights on the same clock. (Ableton Link session tempo.)

Everything is local: Ableton + lamps on your Wi-Fi, nothing in the cloud.

How it works

Ableton Live  ──MIDI──▶  OpenLamp engine  ──HTTP/UDP──▶  lamps on the LAN
 (clips, macros,          (implements the                 (WLED / Tuya)
  automation)              wled-midi convention)

Live emits MIDI per the wled-midi convention; the engine translates it to WLED JSON state (and Tuya) and drives the devices.

The MIDI→lamp translation runs in the engine's midi.py — the reference implementation of the wled-midi convention — which opens the OpenLamp virtual MIDI port. (On-the-beat tempo-follow is the separate openlamp-midi package.)

What this project delivers

• An Ableton Live pack — a MIDI track routed to the lamp port carries notes (colour/power triggers) and CC automation (brightness/hue/sat/CCT/fx). Shipped as draggable .mid clips generated from the mapping (open, reproducible format) plus a pre-routed demo .als template. Stock Live only, no private API.
• A documented setup path — docs/ABLETON-SETUP.md.
• A Control Surface (Max for Live / Remote Script) — on the roadmap (v2), so a script inside Live can reach the lamps directly over the LAN (no separate daemon) with feedback. See docs/DESIGN.md.

Status

🚧 Mode A in progress — mapping pinned to the wled-midi v0.2 convention + 19 generated .mid clips (looks + util + modifiers) shipped; next is testing on real lamps and authoring the .als template. Mode B (Control Surface) is designed, not started. See TASKS.md.

Requirements

• The OpenLamp engine running on the LAN, with its MIDI frontend (midi.py) open — it speaks the wled-midi convention and opens the OpenLamp virtual MIDI port.
• Ableton Live 10+ (the pack uses only stock MIDI devices — no private API).

License

MIT — like the rest of the OpenLamp galaxy: permissive, so anyone can adopt or fork it freely. (The shared convention repo, wled-midi, is MIT too.)