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TouchXY icon

TouchXY

Your trackpad as an XY controller for the selected device in Live.

Press a shortcut keyboard button and your trackpad becomes an XY pad for the device selected in Live. X and Y land on the two parameters you'd most likely reach for, like Frequency and Resonance on an Auto Filter.

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No window needed

TouchXY lives in the JamWare Hub menu with your other JamWare apps. It has no window or menu bar icon of its own.

Press ⌃⌥T with Live in front, sweep, then press it again to get your pointer back. While it's on, the pointer stays still and clicks do nothing, so you can't change anything in Live by accident.

There's also a pad window, for dragging with the mouse or mapping two CCs by hand. Open it from the Hub menu or with ⌃⌥X.

The JamWare Hub menu: Launch all, then MutationStation, Chordinator, MidiMirror, Spectrl and TouchXY, then Ableton setup looks correct
TouchXY in the JamWare Hub menu.
The TouchXY window: a blank pad, with Device, Focus Lock, Lock Pad and the two port lights along the bottom

Features

  • Your trackpad is the controller. Press ⌃⌥T and the whole trackpad maps to the whole pad. The pointer stays still, taps and clicks are ignored, and Live keeps the keyboard, so the space bar still runs the transport.
  • Follows the selected device. On an Auto Filter, X is Frequency and Y is Resonance. Reverb, Echo, Operator, EQ Eight, Compressor and many more have their own pairs. Anything else, third-party plugins included, gets its first two continuous parameters.
  • Live stays in front. With focus lock on, dragging the pad doesn't take focus from Live.
  • MIDI map mode. Turn device mode off and X and Y are two plain 14-bit CCs on channel 16. Map them to anything with Live’s MIDI Map Mode, or in any other DAW.
  • 14-bit on both axes. 16384 steps instead of 128. Live reads the fine and coarse pair as one control.
  • Stays out of the way. It usually runs with no window. ⌃⌥X or the JamWare Hub menu shows the pad, and it floats above full-screen Live.
  • No Control Surface slot of its own. It shares the JamWare slot with MutationStation and Chordinator.

Requirements

macOS 12 or later on Apple Silicon, and Ableton Live for device mode.

Trackpad mode needs Accessibility permission, because it holds the pointer still while you sweep. macOS asks for it the first time.

Intel Macs: untested, should work.

Signed and notarised for macOS.