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

111–120 of 268 posts

Re: Ableton Live 11

#111

Post by seth17 »

taffer wrote: post #104
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…

Interestingly, DAWs have always had flat UI designs, something that many HN commentators seem to frown upon.

I don't believe that this is true. FL Studio had a bit of a dated 00's design for a while. Cubase, Reason, and Pro Tools were also not flat either. I'm not sure that "always" is accurate.

Though, Ableton has been flat since 1.0 it seems.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#112

Post by packetlost »

teucris wrote: post #110
packetlost wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who works in a specialized field (or hobbyists) can tell you the iPad will never be a "pro" device for any serious work outside of art/digital painting. iOS is simply just too limiting, and Apple intentionally neuters the App store to protect the lowest common denominator from shooting themselves in the foot with malware.

I have been using Ableton Live for music production for over a decade, and I can say that if it were ported to work on my iPad, I’d use it every day.

What advantages do you think it offers over using a MBP?

Re: Ableton Live 11

#113

Post by dham »

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

But then you would have to use Mac, which breaks third party plugins every 1 year or so. Most the stuff I invested in when I got started hasn't worked since Lion. All other things that survived were dead with Catalina. Windows you can install stuff from 2003 and run no issue. Work on ARM lol. Most DAWS don't even support 4k monitors. Reason, MPC, Maschine. Not to mention the countless popular plugins that are the size of rain drop on the screen (Ominisphere)

Re: Ableton Live 11

#114

Post by teucris »

packetlost wrote: post #112
teucris wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using Ableton Live for music production for over a decade, and I can say that if it were ported to work on my iPad, I’d use it every day.

What advantages do you think it offers over using a MBP?

1) The launch grid (I forget it’s proper name) is an increasingly common pattern in touch-based music apps; I want to touch the Ableton one. Especially in live performance.

2)The form factor of an iPad makes more sense in my music setup, in that I don’t need to haul podium or standing desk on stage as well as my instruments.

3. In producing tracks, most of my time is spent twiddling knobs, adjusting levels, etc, rather than dealing with external audio interfaces or doing fine grained, fiddly things with a mouse. But now iOS supports a mouse, so I could even do that...

Re: Ableton Live 11

#115

Post by the_other »

marshray wrote: post #103
jancsika wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Knobs and sliders allow users to leverage their spatial and manipulation abilities to specify a value from a continuous range. You could also ask users to just type in a number, but that interrupts the flow and pushes some other data out of their short-term memory. Composers and audio engineers would probably prefer to keep that part of their brain free to focus on other things. Sliders can also be laid out in an arr…

To add to this, the precise value of a control isn’t relevant in most mixing and sound design operations, only it’s value-within-range. Most of the decision-making work is done by ear, not by number. The knobs (and sliders) give you a quick reference to “can I get a bit more out of this”.

Virtual knobs (and sliders) invite experimentation where a numeric control or text box doesn’t (so much). You can play with them. The dragging action gives you a little bit of tactile feedback.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#116

Post by dharma1 »

packetlost wrote: post #106
dharma1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you could have a really good iOS DAW, I think Apple will release Logic for iPad pro at some point. But yes some of the iOS architecture is a bit weird, in terms of apps/plugins/files silos. I think the "no windows" and sandboxed apps/files paradigms are very limiting for pro work. And you really need lots of customisable keyboard shortcuts for most pro work, most iOS apps are extremely lacking in this departm…

FL Studio mobile is already quite capable, and I'm sure Logic for iPad would be great. But most DAWs make heavy use of plugins/VSTs to provide extensibility to the environment, and I highly doubt that will be supported. Why would you use an iPad over a MBP for that kind of thing? I can't imagine the touch-screen gives any sort of real advantage.

iOS does support audio/synth plugins in the form of AUv3, it's a little bit clunky but works.

I work primarily with Logic (been using it for 20 years) but the form factor of an iPad is pretty nice - it fits perfectly on music stands and laptops don't. If Macbook screens would tilt 180 degrees, all the way flat, you might be able to use them on music stands too - but they don't.

If you are both playing and recording a real instrument at the same time, having the iPad on the the piano/music stand in front of you is very useful. Many people use Logic Remote on iPad on the stand, and Logic on MBP for actual recording at the same time. But not sure why you should need two devices.

Touch screen is nice for some things too, like mixing or quickly toggling things.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#117

Post by CobsterLock »

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #42

Something I find interesting is that they're adding built-in entropy to this update. You will now be able to set the probability that a MIDI note will fire in a melody. Or set a range of probabilities for the velocity value of a MIDI note. I'm sure that you will be able to map the range probabilities to the ADSR of synths etc... I'm curious if that is more of a novelty or will actually be a valuable tool for explorin…

Do you get to define seed values? I'm just thinking in terms of reproducibility if you are composing a track instead of playing live. A super cool feature I didn't even think would be helpful before

Re: Ableton Live 11

#118

Post by Jeff_Brown »

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.

Neither Bitwig nor Reaper is open-source.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#119

Post by varispeed »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #81
varispeed wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I read the link. I think your assumptions are wrong and definitely don't match my use case. I know there is a cost of context switching, but even with adding all that I was getting much better performance. I work with 1024 buffer and use CPU heavy plugins. Let's say that my CPU (i9 9900k @5GHz) can run 8 plugins maximum on one core. Now I have 4 tracks, and each track has 4 plugins. That sounds okay, but as soon as I use a send effect on three tracks, they are being processed in one thread and that expects one core to serve 12+1 plugins. Suddenly I get overload and I can't play anything. If I use jBridge, the plugins on each track will run in parallel utilising all cores and playback is smooth. The cpu usage per plugin is higher because of the overhead of the wrapper, but I am able to much more plugins without breaking up. I think Ableton model does not take into account that you are bound by how many plugins one core can service and if you try to cram as many plugins into one thread you'll have performance issue. The strategy should be the opposite - trying to spread the load onto as many cores as possible.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#120

Post by whatch »

teucris wrote: post #110
packetlost wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who works in a specialized field (or hobbyists) can tell you the iPad will never be a "pro" device for any serious work outside of art/digital painting. iOS is simply just too limiting, and Apple intentionally neuters the App store to protect the lowest common denominator from shooting themselves in the foot with malware.

I have been using Ableton Live for music production for over a decade, and I can say that if it were ported to work on my iPad, I’d use it every day.

Or Android.

Actually I was impressed with what people do in GarageBand on ios. Unfortunately I haven't found anything comparable for Android. Only ridiculous $20/month apps.

Post reply on HN