Dragging Tracks From Abletons Browser View to Audio Tracks

What I'm trying to do sounds relatively simple. Using knobs on my midi controller (Traktor S4) I want to browse tracks in Ableton's Browser view. Once I find one I like I want to press a button and load the track to specific audio track (so I have 4 different buttons on the controller and Button A will load to an audio track named 'Deck A' and so on till Deck D).

Individually I am able to accomplish everything. I can browse tracks with knobs. By using mouse clicks/movements attached to a buttons I can get a track from the browser view to be dragged to a specific audio track. However, I can't accurately combine the 2 steps.

What I've been doing is assigning a variable that represents the mouses location. So when I move to the browser I set the mouse to a certain XY position on the screen, then with every movement down or up the mouse position changes to +/- 20 pixels. I then use that to calculate where the mouse should start and move to during the drag and drop portion of 'loading a track'. However the height of each track in the browser window is not consistently 20 pixels and there isn't any pattern to it, so when I select a track to load it rarely ends up in the proper place. It either will end up creating a new audio track entirely (Not what I want), or be placed in the slot below.

I'm sort of trying to emulate Madeon's set-up in which he seems to do this.

I'm hoping someone here might have a better idea to load tracks into Ableton like this. Let me know if you need any more information and thanks in advance.

- Andrew

Anyone have a response to this? Would love to know

You definitely want to avoid using the mouse for this since the positions of items in Live's window can change and there is no easy way to account for that.

Luckily, this sort of thing can be done via keystrokes, though the keystrokes you'd use differ depending on which version of Live you're using. Assuming you’re using the current version of Live 9, here’s the general approach you’d take:

• 1. Select the track and the clip slot on the track where you want to load a clip. There are a variety ways of doing that, so I'll assume you can figure out how to handle it.
• 2. Press Ctrl+Alt+G (or Cmd+Alt+G) to open the browser and move the focus to it so that you can navigate it with keystrokes.
• 3. Use the Up/Down/Left/Right keys to navigate to the clip you want to load.
• 4. Copy the clip with Ctrl+C (or Cmd+C).
• 5. Press Tab twice to move the focus back to the track/clip slot you selected in step #1.
• 6. Paste the clip with Ctrl+V (or Cmd+V).
• 7. Close the browser with Ctrl+Alt+B (or Cmd+Alt+B).

Try this out with a keyboard before writing translators for it.

Also, note that step #2 will not work correctly if the browser is already open and the groove pool is showing. For that reason, you may want to do step #7 with a different control on your controller. That way, you can close the browser before using the sequence above.