clip player

CLIP PLAYER — an Ableton-Session-style clip launcher with 8 INSTRUMENT LANES. Rotates Ableton's layout 90° to sit on a wide monome grid: ROWS = 8 instruments (lanes), COLUMNS = 8 clip slots per instrument (64 note clips total). Each lane plays its launched clip out its OWN pitch/gate/velocity outputs, so up to 8 clips sound at once — one per instrument (the owner model: "each row reflects a given instrument's materials"). It is a companion to a monome grid 128 controller AND to a one- or two-unit Novation Launchpad Mini Mk3 (both browser-native — WebSerial for the grid, WebMIDI for the Launchpad, no native helper — see lib/control/monome + lib/control/launchpad) but is fully usable from the card alone. CLOCK: LOCKED TO TIMELORDE (the rack transport) — no internal BPM, no clock cable. It runs only while TIMELORDE.running, at TIMELORDE.bpm, and freezes when it stops (free-runs if no TIMELORDE is in the rack). The only timing control is STEP (1/4 · 1/8 · 1/16 (default) · 1/32 = steps-per-beat). The card's ▶/■ transport writes TIMELORDE.running, and HIDES itself when TIMELORDE is slaved to an external clock (MIDICLOCK → start_in/stop_in). LAUNCH: clicking a clip queues it; with QNT on (default) it takes over on that lane's next loop boundary (off = immediately). Each lane queues independently, so a whole new arrangement can drop in on the bar line. A "scene" is a COLUMN — firing it launches one clip per instrument together. The per-lane playing/queued set syncs over the Y.Doc so collaborators (and a second grid) see the same session; grid LED + serial I/O stay per-user local. CLIPS are tiny note/step patterns (default 16 steps, up to 128 — set non-destructively, so notes past a shortened length are kept and replay when you lengthen again): polyphonic (chords fan out across the lane's poly pitch/gate pairs), per-note length (held gates), per-note velocity (drives the lane's vel CV), per-note probability, and scale-aware (major/minor/pentatonic/chromatic). Clips may be DIFFERENT lengths per lane; lanes free-run as a POLYMETER and all re-align to step 0 on the TIMELORDE transport downbeat (a fresh ▶ is always phase-locked). CARD: a SESSION view (8×8 launch grid, lane-tinted; single-click = launch/queue, click the playing cell = stop, DOUBLE-CLICK = open the clip's editor) and an EDIT view (a piano-roll note editor — X = step, Y = pitch in-key; click a cell to place/remove a note, right-click to cycle its velocity through 6 levels (≈0/20/40/60/80/100%), with scale/root/length controls, per-lane MONO/POLY, ROW/OCT pitch-window scroll + a TIMELORDE-locked playhead). GRID (16×8): left 8×8 = clip matrix, right control strip = per-lane STOP + SCENE launch + COPY/PASTE/PASTE-REVERSE (held modifiers: hold COPY/PASTE/PASTE-REV + tap a clip to copy it to / paste it from a per-machine buffer; PASTE-REV pastes a time-reversed copy) + STOP-ALL + TRANSPORT; HOLD the EDIT pad + tap a clip to turn the whole grid into that clip's note editor. The on-grid note editor pages a clip in up to 8 pages of 16 steps — FOLLOW auto-scrolls the shown page with the playhead, tap it to FREEZE and page with LEFT/RIGHT; DOUBLE dups the first half into a doubled length; a dedicated 2-row LENGTH page sets the clip length (block ×16 then trim to the exact end step). LAUNCHPAD (Novation Launchpad Mini Mk3, one or two units over WebMIDI): the same clip matrix + note editor, plus a command deck exposing per-lane MONO / MUTE / clock-RATE / SWING / per-clip CLIP-DIV, a RESET pad, tempo nudge, and a KEYS isomorphic keyboard for live note entry + clip-record. Its scene-launch column is a SCROLLING window (shift-layer amber UP/DOWN) reaching up to 64 scene slots per lane — FIXED stride-64 clip storage means clips can live in scenes past the first 8 (older saves migrate once on load) — and a TYPED clipboard COPY/PASTEs whole SCENES (all 8 lanes at a slot, full-replace) as well as single clips: scene→scene and clip→clip apply, the cross-type pastes are no-ops with dimmed targets, and a scene paste is one undo step. SCENE REPEATS (Deluge-style): scenes loop forever by default (repeats = infinite), but HOLD GRID + HOLD a scene-launch button (position-relative through the scene scroll) to open the orange REPEAT-COUNT view — tap pad k to set k repeats (1–63; pad 64 = infinite; pads 1..N stay lit for count N, all 64 = infinite) — and after N passes of the scene's longest clip (frozen at launch) the player auto-launches the next content scene down through the normal quantized launch path, skipping empty rows and keeping the last content scene looping; manual launches always win (relaunching resets the count, an individual clip launch cancels it), muting never voids it, whole-scene COPY/PASTE carries the count with the scene, and the card shows a read-only "×N" flair (live "p/N" while counting) at the right of each scene row. PER-CLIP AUTOMATION (Deluge-like): right-click a MODULE'S CARD → "Assign to automation lane" (1–8; MODULE-level — one lane per module, re-assigning moves it; the assigned card gets a thin border in the lane's colour and the AUTO block shows per-lane assigned-module counts), then arm THAT LANE's teal ◉ (per-lane arm, under its channel column next to RATE; on a Launchpad, SHIFT+the lane's top-row button, lane 8 = double-tap SHIFT) — while a lane is armed and its note clip plays, TOUCHING any control of a module assigned to it (screen / MIDI / Electra — NEVER CV: automation records your hands, a CV cable is performance signal and is never captured) records by CONTINUOUS OVERDUB into the PLAYING clip's OWN automation (punch-in at that clip's next loop start; each clip in a lane carries its own envelopes, stored beside the notes so note edits never clobber them; only moved params are written, max 16 recorded controls per clip; touching an unassigned module's control records nothing — assignment is explicit; per-lane single-writer, so two collaborators can record two lanes at once). Launching a clip launches its envelopes with it (linked to the clip's length); the ENVELOPE BELONGS TO THE CLIP — copy/paste + scene-duplicate carry it (PASTE-REV time-reverses it), pasting over a clip replaces it, clearing/emptying a clip clears it, carriers show a teal dot on their cell, and if two lanes' clips automate the same control exactly ONE drives it (its module's assigned lane wins, else lowest). Deletion is explicit + undoable: right-click → "Clear recorded automation" (per control; distinct from the module menu's "Remove automation assignment", which only stops future recording) and the editor's CLR AUTO (per clip). Playback is transient on every peer and never rewrites the saved patch; grabbing an automated control suspends its automation until you physically release it, and the on-card override dot re-enables all. Two current limits: the on-card grid shows only the first 8 scenes (card scene-scroll is a follow-up), and the arranger records session launches of scenes 1–8 (scene 9+ arranger recording is a follow-up). Inputs — STOP ALL: a rising edge stops every lane (canonical windowed edge counter, no double-count). Outputs — PITCH 1-8: each lane's launched-clip pitch as a poly-capable V/oct cable (chords fill lanes), GATE 1-8: high while that lane's note sounds, VEL 1-8: that lane's per-note velocity as a 0..1 CV (patch into a VCA/ADSR amount). Params — STEP (steps per beat), OCT (octave transpose), GATE (per-step gate duty cycle), QNT (quantize launch to the loop boundary), S&H (ON by default). The upper-right S&H toggle bakes in a gate-sampled Sample & Hold across ALL 8 lanes at once — replacing the 8 external S&H modules a user otherwise needs: on a REST (empty step) the lane's gate still closes but its pitch CV HOLDS its last value instead of resetting to C4, so each lane's pitch latches to the gate edge. Turn S&H OFF for the legacy continuous behavior where rests rewrite pitch. SONG MODE (arranger): the header SES/ARR toggle flips between live SESSION play and ARRANGEMENT playback of a recorded TIMELINE of clip launches (an event log over song-beats). The ● REC arm captures launches into that timeline; the RPL/OVR toggle next to it sets the record mode — REPLACE (default: arming clears the log + restarts the song at bar 1) or OVERDUB (arming KEEPS the existing take and merges new launches into it by song-beat). In ARRANGEMENT view the card shows a compact lane×bar timeline whose clip blocks can be DRAGGED in time (bar-snapped) to retime a launch, selected to cycle/delete, with the loop length nudged in bars. The "ARR ⤢" button pops out a FULL-WINDOW arranger editor (like the MAPPY map editor) hosting a large timeline with the same drag-to-move + all the edit ops + a SNAP bar/beat toggle; it reads/writes the SAME synced arrangement so the card, the pop-out, and peers stay in lock-step. The arrangement is Y.Doc-synced; drags commit one transactional write on drop (no per-frame store churn). All ports live on the yellow drill-down PATCH PANEL (no side jacks); knobs are MIDI / control-surface assignable. Usage: build a few note clips per instrument, patch each lane's PITCH/GATE into its own voice, start TIMELORDE, then launch/quantize-switch clips + scenes from the card (or a monome grid) to perform, RECORD a take into the arrangement (REPLACE or OVERDUB) and refine it by dragging blocks on the timeline (in-card or the pop-out editor). A faithful monome Kria step-sequencer ships as the separate `kria` module.

A clip launcher in the style of Ableton's Session view, with 8 instrument lanes. The grid's rows are the 8 lanes (instruments) and the columns are clip slots — the card shows 8 slots per lane at a time (64 clips at a glance), while on a Launchpad the scene column scrolls through up to 64 scene slots per lane (fixed stride-64 storage; older saves migrate once on load), so clips can live in scenes past the first 8. Each lane independently plays whichever clip you launch out its OWN pitch/gate/velocity outputs, so up to 8 clips can sound at once (one per lane). Click a pad to launch its clip, double-click to open the piano-roll editor and draw notes into it. Each note carries three per-note performance controls. Two of them decide WHETHER the note fires, and they STACK: a PROBABILITY (a firing chance) and a PLAY EVERY (a 1–8 count-divider — the note plays only on every Nth loop of its clip), so a note fires only when it's that loop's turn AND wins its probability roll; both are set from the card's right-click menu (the NOTE PROBABILITY and SKIP EVERY submenus) — on a NOTE CELL they set that one note, on a LAUNCH-GRID CLIP PAD they set the whole clip or, on a Launchpad, SHIFT+tap (probability) and SHIFT+double-tap (play-every, an 8-pad red top-row picker). The third decides WHAT PITCH it fires at: PITCH PROBABILITY, a single "pitch instability" amount from off to 100% in the same 40 increments (card note right-click for now — hardware surfaces are a follow-up). At OFF, which is the default, the note plays exactly the pitch you drew, always. Turning it up progressively loosens the note's identity rather than adding random noise: first occasional ornaments a scale degree away, then frequent but local melodic variation, then wider reharmonisation, and only near the top do out-of-key notes arrive in force. It draws from a weighted spread of candidate pitches measured in SCALE DEGREES of the clip's own key — so a step from E in C major is D or F, not D♯ — with big leaps exponentially rarer than small ones, extra weight on the OCTAVE (and the fifth) so a large move still sounds like the same musical idea, and out-of-key notes fading in gradually instead of switching on. The clip's key governs where a note may wander TO, never the note you actually wrote: a deliberate out-of-key note keeps its own pitch and its own octaves at full weight. A note re-draws its pitch on every pass of the clip rather than freezing into a transposition, and the notes of a chord move independently. The play-every gate and the pitch draw are both DETERMINISTIC from the shared loop count, so collaborators hear the same melody; the firing-probability roll is currently rolled per-peer, so on a probabilistic note different collaborators may hear different notes drop out. Notes colour-code the first two: white always fires, a dimmer purple/orange as probability drops, red (dimmer the higher N) for a play-every note, and a blend of the two for a note that is both — pitch probability instead marks the cell with a DASHED border (a shape, not a third colour, so it stays readable on top of the other two), with the exact amount in the cell's tooltip and the menu's checkmark. There's no internal clock or BPM — CLIP PLAYER is locked to TIMELORDE (the rack transport): it runs at TIMELORDE's tempo, only while TIMELORDE is running, and the STEP control sets how many steps fall per beat. Each lane also has its own clock-rate control (1/8 · 1/4 · 1/2 · 1 · 2x · 4x — the card dropdown, and the Launchpad deck's per-lane RATE row) that divides or multiplies that lane's step rate off the global STEP grid — polyrhythms without leaving the card — and because the tempo comes from TIMELORDE, 2x/4x are exact from the first step. All lanes share a common phase origin (transport start or the RST button), so a 1/2 lane lands on even base steps and stays locked to the others; RST (also a MIDI-assignable button, and the reset input) snaps every active lane back to step 1 and re-anchors that shared origin. Launches can fire immediately or be quantized to snap cleanly at the next loop boundary of the LONGEST currently-playing clip — the shared reference bar (the Deluge model), so mixed-length clips stay phase-locked and short clips don't flip early; a launch fires immediately only when nothing is playing yet (there's no reference loop to line up to) or via a per-lane NOW. It also has a SONG / arrangement mode that records your launches onto a timeline for non-real-time playback, and pairs with a monome grid 128 or a one- or two-unit Novation Launchpad Mini Mk3 for hardware launching. On the Launchpad the scene-launch column is a scrolling window (its shift-layer amber UP/DOWN buttons slide it), and a typed clipboard lets you COPY/PASTE whole SCENES (all 8 lanes at one slot, full-replace) as well as single clips — scene→scene and clip→clip pastes apply, while scene→clip and clip→scene are ignored (their targets dim). SCENE REPEATS (Deluge-style, Launchpad-set): by default a launched scene loops forever (repeats = infinite), but each scene can carry a repeat count 1–63 — after that many passes of the scene's LONGEST clip (its length × rate/div, frozen at launch so mid-count edits never move the scheduled boundaries) the player AUTO-LAUNCHES the next scene DOWN that has content, skipping empty rows, through the normal quantized launch path (arranger-record captures it, LEDs update, peers stay in sync); after the last content scene it keeps looping it. Setting the count is a two-hands Launchpad gesture: HOLD the GRID button + HOLD a scene-launch button → the 8×8 becomes the orange REPEAT-COUNT view (pads 1..N lit row-major from the upper-left; all 64 lit = infinite) — tap pad k to set k repeats, pad 64 for infinite; release either button to return to the grid. The buttons are position-relative through the scene scroll, so a scrolled window edits the correct scene. Counts are content: a whole-scene COPY/PASTE carries the repeat count with the scene (a full-replace paste sets the target's count from the copied scene, clearing it when the source had none). Manual always wins: launching another scene (or re-launching the same one) resets the count fresh, launching an individual clip outside the scene cancels the countdown until the next scene launch, and stopping every scene lane cancels it too — while MUTING lanes never voids or alters the count. The card shows a small read-only "×N" flair to the right of each scene row (nothing shown for infinite; while counting it shows live progress "p/N"); editing the count from the card is a follow-up. PER-CLIP AUTOMATION records parameter moves into the PLAYING clip by CONTINUOUS OVERDUB — Deluge-like: assign modules, launch a clip, arm the lane, twist, and it just keeps overdubbing. Assignment is MODULE-level: right-click a MODULE'S CARD → "Assign to automation lane" → pick lane 1–8 (one lane per module; re-assigning moves it). The assigned module's whole card gets a thin border in that lane's colour, and the AUTO block shows a per-lane assigned-module count. The ARM is PER LANE — the small teal ◉ under each channel column (next to its RATE control), distinct from the experimental red ● arranger record (which records clip LAUNCHES, not knob moves): launch a note clip in the lane, arm THAT lane's ◉, and just MOVE any control on an assigned module — the lane's recorder punches in cleanly at ITS playing clip's own next loop start and overdubs EVERY loop until you press its ◉ again (a manual stop — no auto punch-out); several lanes can record at once, each on its own loop, and different collaborators can record different lanes simultaneously (each lane is single-writer). Automation records your HANDS — screen drags, MIDI CC, Electra — never CV: a CV cable modulating a param is performance signal, not recorded automation (recording reads the modulation-free knob value, and CV never counts as a touch). Touching a control on an UNASSIGNED module while armed records nothing — assign the module first. Each clip's automation caps at 16 recorded controls (a MAX badge flashes when a touch would exceed it). Longer-form automation across a whole song is the (future) arranger mode's job — clip automation is always clip-length. DUPLICATING a clip player copies its content (clips, recorded automation, per-channel settings, the arrangement) but never its LIVE state: the copy is born stopped, disarmed and UNASSIGNED (one lane per module is a global claim — it stays with the original). Each loop, only the params you're actively MOVING are (re)recorded; every other track keeps PLAYING BACK, and a released control reverts to playback next loop; stopping mid-loop keeps the untouched tail. A 🟡🟡🔴🔴 countdown flashes each recording clip's pad (and its lane's ◉ arm) on the last four beats before that clip's own wrap. EVERY clip in the lane carries its OWN automation — THE ENVELOPE BELONGS TO THE CLIP: it's stored beside the notes (editing notes never touches the recorded envelopes), COPY/PASTE and scene-duplicate carry it with the clip (PASTE-REV pastes it time-reversed to match the reversed notes), pasting over a clip replaces its automation, and clearing/emptying a clip clears its automation too. Clips that carry automation show a small teal dot on their grid cell. Launching a clip launches its envelopes with it, looping at the clip's length; if two playing clips in different lanes automate the SAME control, exactly ONE drives it (its module's assigned lane wins, else the lowest lane — no fighting). Deleting is explicit and undoable: right-click an automated control → "Clear recorded automation" wipes that control's envelopes (its module's lane's clips, or everywhere when unassigned) — distinct from the module card's "Remove automation assignment", which only stops FUTURE recording and leaves recorded envelopes playing — and the editor's CLR AUTO button wipes the open clip's whole automation while keeping its notes. On playback it drives those params transiently on every peer (never rewriting the saved clip). Parameter moves never JUMP: when a lane stops or switches away from an automating clip the params HOLD their last automated value — recomputed from the clip data at the stop position, quantized to the step grid so collaborating peers converge on the same resting value (never a snap to zero/default) — and every unavoidable seam (the loop wrap, switching INTO an automating clip, and a quantized switch AWAY, which holds at the musical boundary rather than cutting early) is a short click-free glide rather than a hard step. Grabbing an automated control live SUSPENDS its automation (live wins) until you physically RELEASE it — a gesture that spans a loop wrap is never yanked back to the envelope mid-drag, a wrap commit only overwrites the part of the loop the gesture actually covered, and a param gripped by two surfaces at once (screen + MIDI) stays live until the last one lets go; on release the param glides back to playback (the on-card dot re-enables all at once). Two current limits are documented honestly: the on-card grid shows only the first 8 scenes (card scene-scroll is a follow-up), and the arranger records session launches of scenes 1–8 (recording launches of scene 9+ is a follow-up — session launching them already works). Drive its lanes into eight voices for a full multitrack clip-based performance instrument.

the faceplate

inputs

outputs

params

controls

source

clipplayer.ts on GitHub.