Need to know: Does Mu work?

I use the lemur on the ipad mostly with Mu.

A few months agao, I read a review of the lemur app in the app store that said Mu no longer works with either the latest ios or lemur software version.

Because of this I have held off on updating my lemur software or ipad's operating system.

I'm wondering if Mu now works with the latest versions of everything. Is it safe to update my stuff?

Thanks very much!

I'm new to this, but for me it works, but crashes too frequently to be any use...

because I'm new to Ableton and want to learn it, I've been doing many sessions recently, and Mu is always the central controller next to the BCF2000 which covers the Live mixer. Haven't had any problems with Mu. It always works and even automatically loads the Lemur template.

Mu alone is worth 50 bucks or more. Fantastic controller.


Edit: I might add that I've used Mu/Live on many different computers, Mac and PC.

Thanks for the replies!

Are you guys both using the latest versions of ipad's ios and the lemur app?

It mostly works - the Device Control section seems to have fallen into some disrepair with changes to the Live API or LOM (or something) through the years but otherwise functions as advertised.

I found that it crashed the latest version of Lemur (v4) on load, so rolled back my version to the last 3.n.n (keep those .ipa files handy folks!) whereupon Mu worked fine again.

I'd be pretty certain that LiveControl 2 will blow the doors off Mu in almost every conceivable way in any case and, presumably that's been developed on and with v4 in mind.

I'm a bit surprised. The transition to Lemur 4.0 was flawless for me. Mu works as before, no difference.

Joe Soap wrote: I'd be pretty certain that LiveControl 2 will blow the doors off Mu in almost every conceivable way in any case and, presumably that's been developed on and with v4 in mind.

I'm looking forward to it. But Max sends clip names back to Lemur, which I find enormously practical, while other hard- or software controllers only light up a pad or so. LiveControl won't have this luxury.

I don't have any real Live sets yet, I just use a couple of tracks filled with Bill Laswell loops, no effects/plugins, and like to know what's coming when I tip on a pad. The other feature I like much in Mu is the Tempo tap. With tapping I can always sync to the drummer, and fade in some tracks with the BCF. That's just great.

What do you mean with 'Device Control'? Sometimes I throw a Live effect into a track, and it can be instantly controlled with Mu (if the effect is supported). The only downside is that you can connect only one iPad to Max/Live. That's why I love my resurrected BCF doing valuable work with its motor faders. When I have my Live sets ready, I'll probably set up an additional iPad for effect control.

I could be wrong but I have a suspicion (or hope) that LC2 leverages Max in some way or other, either as a MFL device or as a Runtime. Both would be best, in terms of access and customisation for the former and availability on the latter. I think the parameters you mention are retrievable via the Python API for Remote Scripts and should be doable even without Max?

My take on the thing from this distance is it might be a hybrid / best-of-breed setup, but this is just idle speculation mixed with wishful thinking.

Device control crashes Lemur for me when I try to open a device - this is something I only discovered recently enough, so it may be a new thing or something changed in my setup. It's not a dealbreaker for me as I don't use it anyway. I don't think I'm the only one this happens to though, albeit the reasons could be different for those folks.

I'm using Lemur 4 and iOS 6.
I can open up devices with no problem, but certain pages/parameters cause a crash when I click on them.
At this point, I have high hopes for LiveControl 2....

Thanks for all the input.

I still have my lemur 3.2 .ipa file. I'll guard it with my life!

Joe Soap, are you using the latest version of ios? If not, what version?

If you're using the latest version of ios, and lemur 3 works, but not 4 then I guess that would mean the issue is with the Lemur 4 software.

That Device Control software looks good. I've put hours into making custom mu templates with max 4 live for my favorite vst plugins so ive been pretty happy with the mu setup.

I'd hate to loose them by Pushing the update button on the lemur app or the ipad.

I'm on iOS 6.01, the one before last (6.02 fixed some issue with the telephony side of things, didn't even show up in iTunes for my iPad (WiFi-only model) . . . and I'm guarding that with my life.

Some teething problems with v4 are to be expected I think, and not everyone seems to be having the same issues I experienced. Some do, some don't, some ran into different quirks. Updates imminent we're told so all's cool in the skool.

I didn't quite get where the problem lies with Lemur 4. When exactly does it crash? Is this crash reproducible, or only happening occasionally?

Under certain circumstances Mu/Lemur does crash, or Max doesn't find the iPad. I haven't really found out when that happens, but it happened with earlier Lemur versions as well. I guess the best way of setting up Mu is to run Lemur first, then load or create the Live set with the Mu M4L device. In most cases this works instantly and the set is ready for performance.

And if a crash occurs, simply run Lemur and try again. It rarely crashes a second time. I'm quite sure it has rather to do with the right succession of setting things up than with the Lemur version. And LiveControl 2 will probably not run with Lemur 3.x.

It crashes reproducibly under a variety of circumstances, loading Mu is only one of them. The Editor crashes similarly. I described some of these in other threads here on the boards and others chimed in to confirm so I won't repeat these here. Sent Windows error logs from the editor crashes off to the devs for analysis, and enquired if there was anything similar I can get from iTunes for the Lemur app crashes but didn't get a reply.

Be nice to know, so I could send off the crashlogs from Griid Pro too.


I assume LC2 is probably meant for v4 but it wouldn't be too hard to backport it given that there's (as of yet) no new core scripting functionality or objects that I'm aware of? Of course, something along those lines might make an appearance with the release of LC2 and the promised updates . . . so I'd hope the flakiness gets fixed by then, I'd prefer to be running the new version, obviously.

I'm much more interested in what LC2 brings to the table on the Remote Script / Max side of the equation than on the Lemur template side of the equation either way - that's where the rubber meets the road.

true, the editor crashes from time to time. Mostly on Windows, but also on Mac (very rarely). But here also I don't see the problem. Simply relaunch the editor, download the template from the iPad, and continue with the work.

Of course it would be better if app and editor were more stable, and I'm sure the dev team are working on improvements.

Sure. That's the case generally for v3 and it's what we live with - it's just v4 absolutely needs a little more work for it to be (even) that stable on my setup at least, which is a fairly unspectacular and generic Win 7 Pro job. It can't be the case where one has to carefully avoid this or that perfectly valid or normal sequence of actions to keep either the editor or the app up and running, and rebooting as SOP is the kind of voodoo that went out with Windows 98. Not reliable for gigging.

My intuition on the matter is that testing on Win 7 and up isn't quite so well covered by the dev team as it could be - it looks to be primarily a Mac shop, if the nasty little .ds_store files I see aren't lying to me . (I'm looking to get a Mac Mini pretty soon, so Apple someday getting a non-completely-sh*t filesystem interests me greatly)

I acknowledge that my issues aren't universal, but they're not unique. As I've said before, hopefully the updates resolve matters for all but the genuine corner cases.

Phil999, in my case, yes, it is reproducible. With Live's Electric device there are parameters that crash it every time as soon as I tap them.