I’ve got an odd one. Even after removing and reinstalling Beam, the Generic Device isn’t seeing the parameters of any of the devices in Beam. Beam says it’s connected in the window title bar, and the intensity and RGB controls on the Generic device work just fine… but the other parameters aren’t connecting to the device controls. video at Dropbox
I have to say it was working last time with the v2 beta plugins i had from November last year, but I’ve had a bit of self-inflicted chaos upgrading and converting everything to the new schema, and decided a fresh install was a good thing to do, and commit to just using the latest plugins. Unfortunately woe became me anyway.
I’m not entirely sure everything from the beta and v1 versions is gone from my system… could that be causing an issue? Or I was wondering maybe some kind of caching of Max devices in Live that I could clear?
Very excited to be so close to actually getting everything working the way i want after 18 months futzing about with Beam anyway
UPDATE: OK so I ended up starting a new Beam patch and adding all the fixtures back in… working fine… then I went to add an LFO to a moving head device and the LFO says ‘disconnected’ and can’t select a parameter to modulate.
One other weird thing I spotted is that if i open a ‘disconnected’ device in the Max editor, i was sometimes (not always) able to get it to somehow display a list of tags from within my Beam set up so I know there was communications happening. Very strange.
Hi Steward, that’s strange! Your mention of the Max editor sparks a question:
One other weird thing I spotted is that if i open a ‘disconnected’ device in the Max editor,
We use network communication for the connection between the Beam application and the Max for Live devices. This includes populating the drop-downs and notifying the devices that Beam is running. When you edit a device and have Max open in the background, it could happen that Max intercepts all communication between Beam and the devices, potentially causing the issues you’re describing.
Generally it’s best to ensure you don’t have a Max standalone instance running in the background, and after you edited a device, fully quick Max instead of just closing the patcher window.
Perhaps this could be related? Do you still run into the ‘Disconnected’ issue when you (for instance) restart your computer and have Live and Beam be the only apps you run?
I hear what you’re saying… I noticed when Max editor is running Beam will complain in the console that it can’t connect to [random TCP port number] so I was kind of already aware of that
I should mention one suspect in all this… because it was working pretty well at the beginning of last week but at some point both Live and the OS had an update so I’m now running Live 12.1.5 on macOS 15.1.1 and wondering if something’s changed.
I never managed to remove Beam entirely and have the full out-of-box re-installation experience. I’m talking about the OS popup that asks me if it’s OK for Beam to connect to devices on the network. I’ve tried turning the checkbox off & on in System Settings but that doesn’t feel as effective as revoking everything and starting over. If you have a guide to doing a clean uninstall of Beam I’d be happy to follow that and see if that resets anything…
Well, I think I’ve found the problem, and it’s not anything to do with inter-app communication or anything.
I ended up reinstalling both Live and Beam, to force the OS to give me the “allow this app to connect to the network?” prompt and add it into the security settings. I was completely mystified when this didn’t solve the issue, so I created a new Beam patch and … well to cut a long story short I’m attaching this fixture definition which breaks Beam for reasons I cannot understand. Soon as I add it to the patch, I get the “disconnected” showing in various bits of Beam devices even though I can still control the RGB parts. When I remove this fixture, everything connects automatically and it all works like it should.
So it seems to me this fixture def is triggering a bug somewhere, but I can’t fathom it. Seems like a perfectly reasonable fixture def to me?!
Hi @dj2mn - thanks so much for figuring this out! I can reproduce the problem with your fixture profile on my machine!
The profile looks reasonable on first sight indeed. I need to do some investigation. I expect this to be a bug somewhere that we can fix. I’ll let you know what I find out.
Hi @dj2mn - it looks like the modulation with the name mode is causing issues in the Generic Max for Live device. This is something we’ll have to fix on our side so I made a ticket for it and we’ll try to get to is as soon as possible.
As a workaround, you could rename the mode key to something else. If you open the profile in a text editor, you simply change the word mode on line 35. You can also remove the entire block for mode if you’re not planning on controlling it from Live.
Thanks again for your identifying the problematic profile, that helped a bunch. And sorry for the hassle!
Terrific! thanks for figuring that out for me… now I just have to tear myself away from the beach holiday and get back to the studio to make it all work!
