Ableset Cues: Song Titles announced at the top the of the song everytime

Feature Requests
1

Minor inconvenience, but basically I would like the song title to announce at the beginning of each Song every time. Currently Its set up to announce only if you’re coming from another song. So if you’re playhead is set at 1.1.1 and hit play that first song title will not be announced, but if playback stopped in the middle of song 2 and Fire song 1 directly from there then it is announced.
Again, Minor inconvenience, but a quality of life upgrade for sure. Thanks again for your hard work! I was not expecting such a quick fix/update to my previous issue!

2

Hey @Cjbelt14,

Thanks for the kind words!

What you’re seeing is expected behavior: “Auto-Speak Song Titles” announces a song when you jump to it while playback is stopped. If the playhead is already parked at the start of the song and you just hit play, no jump happened, so nothing gets announced.

You can work around this with an OSC track:

  1. Create a MIDI track and name it:
Cues +OSC [/cues/say] [single]
  1. Place a short MIDI clip at the very beginning of each song, and name the clip exactly like the song (e.g. Never Gonna Give You Up).

Each clip name is then sent as /cues/say "Never Gonna Give You Up", which speaks the title through the AbleSet Cues plugin.

A couple of notes on the track name:

  • [/cues/say] is a prefix that gets added to every clip name on that track, so the clip only needs to contain the song title.
  • [single] makes AbleSet treat the whole clip name as one string argument. Without it, each word would be parsed as a separate argument.

OSC clips are triggered when the playhead crosses the clip’s start, and also when the playhead is placed inside the clip while playback is stopped — so parking the playhead at the top of a song should announce it as well. If you notice the cue firing twice in some situations, let me know and we can fine-tune the clip length and attributes.

You can also see this in action in the official tutorial.

That said, I’ll pass the suggestion along!

Would that work for your use case?

1 Like
3

I tried it out and it still wouldn’t play if the midi clip was right at the beginning I think I’d need to nudge it a bit for the playhead to cross it slightly after the start of the session, but currently Its not worth the extra effort to add all that in for me at least. Again its a minor inconvenience, but would love to see the option become available in the future! Thanks again!

4

Hey @Cjbelt14,

Thanks for testing it!

If you ever want to revisit it, there’s one more approach that doesn’t require touching your session at all. Instead of mapping your controller’s play button to the Play action, you can map it to a Custom Script (Settings → MIDI Mapping, OSC & Scripting → Edit MIDI Mapping) with this:

// Announce the current song, then start playback
sendOsc("/cues/say", osc("/setlist/activeSongName"));
await sleep(1500);  // adjust to taste
sendOsc("/global/play");

This announces the title first and then starts playback, so it works no matter where the playhead is sitting. One minor caveat: there’s no way to know the exact length of the generated phrase in advance. It also only applies when you start playback from that mapped button.

Either way, I’ll pass your suggestion along.

Hope that helps!