Playback position in bars/beats

[gloverab]

Hey there, and thank you for this incredible ableton implementation.

I feel like I’m missing something, but I haven’t been able to figure out where I can get/observe the Song position in bars/beats. I’m able to get the position in seconds easily, but can’t for the life of me figure out where to access the current position on the grid.

Any tips? Thanks!

[gloverab]

Update: I figured it out. current_song_position is giving the total number of beats elapsed, not seconds.

Quick formulas I wrote if anyone wants to save themselves the math.

let totalBeatsZeroIndex = Math.floor(currentSongTime);
let barZeroIndex = Math.floor(currentSongTime / 4);

let totalBeats = totalBeatsZeroIndex + 1;
let bar = barZeroIndex + 1;
let beat = Math.floor(currentSongTime - 4 * barZeroIndex) + 1;
let division = Math.floor((currentSongTime - totalBeatsZeroIndex) / 0.25) + 1;

[leolabs]

That's how I did it as well! As long as your song stays in 4/4 time signature, this will work well 👍

[gloverab]

Oh yeah, I should have noted for anyone who comes across it - you can use other time signatures by turning those 4s into variables based off the signature_numerator property.

But while I have the man himself here - are there any plans/is it even possible to implement toggling between the browser window and document window? Something like the ability to browse through clips and load them onto tracks/scenes via javascript? I was looking at the ApplicationView class/interfaces and it looks like there aren't any setters in there. Is that a limitation of the ableton control surface api or have you just not dove in on that side yet?

Thanks for everything @leolabs -this is an awesome tool.

[leolabs]

Glad you like it! 😊

You can use the functions available on the ApplicationView class to focus different views. For example, you could focus the browser like this:

await ableton.application.view.focusView("Browser")

There's also toggleBrowse which may or may not be better for what you're trying to do. Let me know if this helps!