How To: Create a fancy flashing VU meter for your apc40 in Traktor

[defektedtoy]

For those of you wanting to do this as well, I couldn't get the scene launch buttons to be any color other than green so i made a dual channel VU meter in channels 3 and 6 of my apc40.

HOW TO:

You can create either a left and right master out VU, or just one overall meter.

to do this click:

file> controller manager> add out> output> master level (or master level right/left)

Instead of being able to use the "learn" function to map which button you want to light up, with outputs you have to select it manually. Everyone has different ways of doing this, i just do a quick:

add in> modifier> modifier #8> learn

to figure out what the midi map is for each key then write them down then delete the new "in modifier #8" i just made.

The controller range is like the level at which the LED will turn on.

For instance with a range of [min .2 max 1] my bottom most LED will light up faster, and with lower volume than my top most LED which has a range of [min .98 max 1] which takes a higher volume to light up.

The midi range determines what color the LED is and how it behaves (blinking, color switching etc).

There are quite a few guides on dealing with the LED's on the apc40, but I'll just explain what I have used here. 0 = off 1 = green 5 = amber and 3 = red.

From topmost LED to bottom mine looks like this essentially

     COLOR             Controller range
[min 0   max 3]       RED       [min .98 max 1]
[min 0   max 5]       AMBER     [min .8  max 1]
[min 0   max 1]       GREEN     [min .6  max 1]
[min 0   max 1]       GREEN     [min .4  max 1]
[min 0   max 1]       GREEN     [min .2  max 1]

So here you can see that when there is no volume, no LED's are lit up, (min 0) very low volume lights the bottom LED a value of .2 until that volume is surpassed (it's minimum controller range number), making it solid (it's maximum controller range number) and continues on like that, in this case up the tree.

You can play around with the ranges and colors to find something you like. I just wanted to have a nice flashy visual cue for my clipping levels.

I hope this helps people, I will try to answer any questions you guys ask, although be forewarned, I just started messing with this stuff so I'm not exactly a guru or anything, but with the help of a few other forum members I was able to figure this stuff out.

[muffintop]

I'm making flashing vu on my launchpad right now. Thanks!

[yann_]

how about doing it this way but with the scene launch buttons ?
http://youtu.be/Jw3rOkzhPNk

he's using the clip stop buttons

[BradCee]

why did you put 'color' instead of 'midi range'?

[mablack]

Is the second tsi you posted the mac version that the vu meters work?

[padi_04]

I did this a while back but had to remove it to keep it compatible with previous versions Traktor versions running on PCs. (native mode + send mon. state, etc)

Only thing i'd like to add is that it's better to have the top 3 leds with smaller ranges so you get better resolution on the upper 30%.