Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ableton Live 11

ableton.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 268 posts

Re: Ableton Live 11

#81

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

varispeed wrote: post #70
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wrapping the VST plugins in their own separate processes. This isn't an optimization. https://ardour.org/plugins-in-process.html And also, the kernel cannot schedule more efficiently than Ableton does, because it doesn't know the data dependencies between plugins.

That's not what my experience tells me. If you read on Ableton website: > Live uses one thread to process a signal path. A signal path is a single chain of audio flow. In tracks where instrument or effect racks are used, with multiple chains in parallel, Live may use one thread per chain depending on how CPU-intensive each chain may be. If two tracks are "chained" by routings, for instance by a side-chain routing, a…

You should read the link I posted (I wrote it).

Ableton's scheduling could be quibbled with, but it's better than the kernel can do.

Ps. I'm the original author of Ardour, a cross-platform DAW. We use a different model than Ableton for scheduling, but not that different. We run N threads (based on a user preference for how many cores to use) and they pull signal paths from a pool, process them, and go back for more. The result is "1 thread per signal path".

Re: Ableton Live 11

#82

Post by djeiasbsbo »

mhh__ wrote: post #55
xriddle wrote: post #13

Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.

DAWs, especially ones like ableton, are one of those types of software where they aren't that difficult on paper but the entropy of one is high enough you need a team of people to get going in the first place

What makes them not difficult? I have coded a small synthesizer with midi input some time ago and I thougt the real time audio processing was pretty challenging. There needs to be almost no latency.

An entire DAW will be much more complex.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#83

Post by breakfastduck »

salimmadjd wrote: post #5
breakfastduck wrote: post #3

They did it. They finally added comping. I would be buying the upgrade if that was the only feature but there's so many!

For someone like me who uses Logic, is there a reason to use Ableton? Logic is only one $200 lifetime fee

I converted to Ableton from Logic (pre logic x) a long time ago, but I still use logic sometimes.

There’s lots of small differences, and obviously you can make any type of music successfully on either, but generally my advice would be:

If you prefer recording traditional instruments & band tracks stay with logic,

If you prefer experimenting with sound design & electronic music in general, try ableton out. Also if you’re a programmer because you’ll enjoy max for live and the max MSP ecosystem.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#84

Post by breakfastduck »

lostgame wrote: post #9
breakfastduck wrote: post #3

They did it. They finally added comping. I would be buying the upgrade if that was the only feature but there's so many!

Seriously. That alone has been one of the big things keeping me firmly in Logic Pro's camp. I'm also glad they're starting to add more instruments to the default package (notably, finally; a proper 'Upright Piano') - as the value proposition of Ableton Standard at $400 vs Logic Pro at $200 has been extremely one-sided in Logic's favour for many, many years now. I do understand, of course; I'm strictly speaking as a M…

Hard to compare price, Logic is crazy underpriced because it’s existence brings in so many Mac users. It undercuts other daws by a mile because of that.

However, what you get with ableton live suite is well worth the money. It’s good value.

But I’d still always run any DAW on a Mac. No audio drivers on windows beat CoreAudio on macOS.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#85

Post by capableweb »

adamnemecek wrote: post #31

I've been working on an IDE for music composition. I'll be launching soon http://ngrid.io I setup a discord channel the project https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG

I feel like you always appear to plug your vaporware every time any music production tool comes up on the front page. I would be OK with that if what you're linking actually had some content on it or we could actually play with it.

But the last 10 times I've seen you mention it, it's been without any details what so ever and without any ability to actually see/use it.

Might actually been more than 10 times now when I searched for it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Ableton Live 11

#86

Post by jancsika »

sph wrote: post #4

As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools. In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, an…

> Knobs

Can someone explain to me the point of a GUI knob?

Is it just the analogy to physical knobs on mixers that makes people comfortable with them in GUIs?

Re: Ableton Live 11

#87

Post by robenkleene »

packetlost wrote: post #17
sph wrote: post #4

As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools. In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, an…

You'd end up with GarageBand. It all depends on the target audience. If you have a piece of software meant to be used by experts, it should be powerful enough that it doesn't restrict them. I disagree that software has a tendency to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, simplifying and automating things is the purpose of software in the first place, but there's a huge amount of software out there tha…

It's actually amazing how consistent the pattern is for professional creative apps, I did a study of market leaders across various industries[1] (based on the best data I could fine), and every single one supports some form of extension. Just doing a quick eye-ball glance, and I'd guess every single one of the apps I looked at also supports some form of scripting.

(This is only tangentially relevant to this thread, but the iOS App Store doesn't allow extensions or scriptable apps, and I believe those rules will single-handedly assure iPad only ever has marginal impact on creative fields until those rules are removed.)

1: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...

Re: Ableton Live 11

#88

Post by robenkleene »

jancsika wrote: post #86
sph wrote: post #4

As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools. In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, an…

> Knobs Can someone explain to me the point of a GUI knob? Is it just the analogy to physical knobs on mixers that makes people comfortable with them in GUIs?

What's a better UI for this? The times when a knob (or slider) are appropriate is when you're adjusting something by eye or ear (e.g., you don't know the exact destination value in advance).

Re: Ableton Live 11

#89

Post by qppo »

varispeed wrote: post #54

It seems like they say nothing whether they optimised their audio engine. There are a couple of low hanging fruits that they avoid to pick for some reason that would vastly improve the performance. For example they could enable wrapping the VST plugins in their own separate processes. That means the operating system scheduler would be able to distribute the load on available cores in a more efficient way than Ableton…

The problem is reducible to maximum directed cuts in arbitrary DAGs, which is hardly "low hanging fruit." The OS scheduler is a particularly poor choice of solution and introduces a ton of overhead while solving it suboptimally.

Granted you can use a lot of heuristics to figure out simpler solutions since DAW graphs aren't arbitrary DAGs and you can get clever with how you allow them to be constructed, but it's non obvious. That's why parallel performance varies a lot between daw engines.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#90

Post by wcerfgba »

colordrops wrote: post #32
xriddle wrote: post #13

Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.

If you want a DAW that is similar to Ableton and works on Linux, you should go with Bitwig, which is in some ways better and more modern than Ableton, but has a smaller user base.

I have actually found the clip/scene feature in Bitwig to be better than the equivalent feature in Ableton. In Bitwig I can set the DAW to record a set number of bars for each clip and then start looping immediately after recording finishes, which is my perfect workflow for building a track. With Ableton I was not able to do this, and instead I would be required to hit 'stop' and then manually crop the clip by changing its length.
Post reply on HN