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Ableton Live 11

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Re: Ableton Live 11

#141

Post by deeblering4 »

packetlost wrote: post #96
robenkleene wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

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.

Since music making is art I guess I won’t disagree.

There’s a large ecosystem of iOS music making apps and the iPad is actually an excellent interface for some applications, e.g. a kaoss pad.

For instance have a look at what Korg and Moog have available in the app store. Or check out drambo.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#142

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

timdaub wrote: post #98
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you think a DAW is, but typically it tends to involve the possibility of dealing with large numbers of tracks and vast amounts of audio. How do you propose to do this in a browser context?

At this point I don't propose any design. But I'm confident it can be done. You seem to know the challenges ahead. Mind sharing?

https://ardour.org/

Re: Ableton Live 11

#143

Post by varispeed »

qppo wrote: post #89
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 o…

But how Ableton is doing it is worse than OS scheduler, that's the point.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#144

Post by munificent »

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.

Reason is quite possibly the king of skeumorphic design, across all software categories and all time.

https://www.reasonstudios.com

Re: Ableton Live 11

#145

Post by qppo »

varispeed wrote: post #143
qppo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

But how Ableton is doing it is worse than OS scheduler, that's the point.

I don't have access to Ableton's source code so I can't benchmark it to tell you if it's doing better or worse than the OS scheduler, but I would be shocked if it was worse. The penalty for even thread synchronization is quite high, let alone interprocess sync'ing. Particularly when it comes to latency.

Sand boxing isn't done for performance reasons, and it's why you can disable it in bitwig. The sole purpose of sand boxing a plugin in its own process is because it is the only way to catch a segfault and prevent a shared library from crashing a host.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#146

Post by munificent »

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…

> Or set a range of probabilities for the velocity value of a MIDI note.

The velocity MIDI effect already let you randomize all note velocities by a user-controlled range. This just lets you set random ranges per-note.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#147

Post by munificent »

blub wrote: post #47
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…

People seem to love this probability trigger feature in Elektron products.

YES. The Elektron sequencer is the first time I ever felt stepping out of a computer might make for a more powerful, fun sequencing experience. It's a joy to use.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#148

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

varispeed wrote: post #119
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If plugins A, B and C are present in a given signal path, and ordered [ A, B, C ], then you cannot parallelize their execution. A must run first, then its output is fed to B, which must run to completion, and its output is fed to C. Using a single thread for this is the only sane implementation.

If you have plugins A, B and C spread across 3 signal paths, then you can certainly run them on different cores, which Ableton (and Ardour and almost any other DAW at this point) will do, by virtue on running each signal path in its own thread. The signal path/thread containing plugin A will execute on a thread/core, independently of the one containing B or the one containing C.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#149

Post by munificent »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #74
dmicah wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, Ableton actually has pretty great tutorials in the program itself that can help to learn the software as well.

I understand that and not saying it is not great, just that it seems to be more difficult to master than I expected. It can be fun to tinker with and learn if you have the time. One problem I think is that the documentation is scattered there's not single Bible to read to learn all about it, is there? In the world of programming languages there's a lot of books called "cookbooks" - recipes for how to do things that m…

> there's not single Bible to read to learn all about it, is there?

There is. The reference manual:

https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/welcome-to-live/

It is incredibly well-written. Possibly my favorite piece of technical writing ever, and am myself a technical author.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#150

Post by munificent »

Ableton Live is my absolute favorite piece of software right now. It fills me with a joy I haven't felt since I first learned HyperCard or Photoshop. It's just marvelous. In fact, it's so good that it makes it harder for me to finish music since I keep tinkering on things. But I can just sink hours into it without noticing the time pass.

It's so easy to get jaded with software these days because of freemium apps, dark patterns, social media apps hijacking human psychology to drive up engagement, etc. Ableton Live reminds me that software can be beautiful and empowering, and how good and natural it feels to just pay money for a well-crafted product.

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