Can Canvas osc buttons Access Drum Rack midi triggers?

Tech Talk
1

All,

Does anyone know if I can access drum rack midi notes via the Canvas osc buttons? I Use drum rack to organize cues so the midi notes get Friendly names in the time line.
I’m Hoping to see a button panel on an iPad of everything I have assigned in the drum rack. let me know if anyone has a way they might be doing anything similar to access the drum rack.

Thanks

Matt

2

Hey @Mattwalker7362514, you can use the /midi/send OSC commands to send MIDI notes to any output on your computer, including IAC loopbacks on macOS so you can feed those notes back into a drum rack, for example.

Would that work for your use case? :slight_smile:

3

Hey! Were you able to make this work? I’m also curious to see if I can set up the same for my setup. I have the IAC Driver setup correctly as I use it for other things, I just can’t seem to get Ableton to recognize any midi cc from the Canvas.

4

Hey @SirDandol!

Just to double-check a couple of things:

  1. Are you running the latest beta?

  2. In Ableton Live → Preferences → Link, Tempo & MIDI, make sure that on the MIDI Input corresponding to your IAC Driver, Track is enabled.
    If Track is off, Live won’t actually receive the CC messages, even though they’re being sent.

In Canvas view, add a Button element and put the OSC command directly in OSC Command on Press, like this:

/midi/send/cc "MIDI DEVICE NAME" 1 64 127

(Replace "MIDI DEVICE NAME" with the exact name of your IAC port as it appears.)

Here’s an example button you can try with the exact same configuration:

IAC Driver CC.json (579 Bytes)

Let me know if this works for you, I’m looking forward to your reply!

5

I’m on the latest beta! And actually that worked perfectly! Thank you so much

1 Like
6

Okay last question with this. Is there a way or a M4L device that can send what clip is playing in session view? Or a way to update midi so that the canvas can be updated with ableton? I ask this because I use tracks through arrangement view but if I play keys I use session view to launch clips with my keys presets.

Screenshot 2026-01-20 at 9.08.21 AM
Screenshot 2026-01-20 at 9.08.21 AM2250×642 100 KB

With what you helped me with before I was able to get the Canvas to be able to send midi to Ableton to be able to select the clip but it’s only a momentary light up on the canvas. And if I switch directly on the computer it would be awesome if Canvas could update as well.

Is there any way to do this? Normally I would use “remote” on Ableton settings to send midi updates to my devices but I think either the IAC Driver or OSC messages cause Ableton to freak out and start or stop playback and glitch out.

Thanks for the help yall! Sorry if this is complicated