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Ableton Live 11

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Re: Ableton Live 11

#151

Post by varispeed »

qppo wrote: post #145
varispeed wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's from my experience. Ableton is optimised to cram as many plugins onto a single thread as possible, which means you are quickly going to run out of processing power when using more CPU demanding plugins, because as soon as you exhaust one cpu core, the project will no longer play in real time. When plugins run from their own process, the OS take care of distributing the load across multiple cores and that lets you run more plugins before it will overload. So I agree that sandboxing is not done to gain perfomance, but better perfomance is an unintended side effect. That shows how bad Ableton scheduling is.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#152

Post by BenGosub »

anotheryou wrote: post #72
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…

Have you checked out bitwig? I love the help overlay. Explains everything while you can turn the knobs. Same for their graphical programming thing ("grid" I think). A nice hybrid between skeumorphic and digital with e.g. stylized wires hanging down in gravity, but becoming transparent when crossing components. Also super nice that most "visualizations" are also interactive (see the direct manipulation of the envelope…

I am a Bitwig user, really love that they support Linux. Their platform is very stable and the modulations are imo the differentiating factor.

Ableton is a beast, I haven't used it as much, but I know.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#153

Post by varispeed »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #148
varispeed wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Able…

Let me try to explain again. In Ableton one signal path executes in one thread. Any track that goes to send or to a group gets added to one thread, so that if you have [A, B, C] on track one and [D, E, F] on track two - they will run in parallel - that's fine. However, if you send track one and track two to a send track with [G], they both run on a single thread, so it becomes [A, B, C, D, E, F, G], if a single core can only process four plugins, Ableton will be stalling. If you run each plugin in a separate process, then [A, B, C] and [D, E, F] will run in parallel and the results will go to [G]. As long as either [A, B, C] or [D, E, F] will not exhaust the single core, the playback will be smooth. The same happens if you group tracks or use side chain. Plugins in the chain will all run on single thread, but they could run in parallel up until the point where they "meet". Simplest way to achieve that is to do that sandboxing or more efficient way would be to improve the thread allocation to be more granular.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#154

Post by adamnemecek »

p0nce wrote: post #136
adamnemecek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is that I'm going for something somewhat different than what current DAWs are and I feel like what I'm going for will be easier to understood by seeing it. Tell me what you expect I will tell you whether your workflow is supported. If you are interested, sign up and I'll notify you when I launch.

Keep it up! I've subscribed. I hate most of DAWs.

Thanks for the encouragement.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#155

Post by bsder »

whatch wrote: post #120
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.

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.

Blame Google. Android has a craptastic audio stack and only Google can fix it.

Google would have to rip the heart out of Android and fix it for real time programming properly like OS X did way back in like 10.2?.

However, don't get me wrong, iOS isn't great--it's just at least possible. The fact that you can't actually send a defined packet (just a bag of bytes and you don't know how many until the call--"HAH! HAH! You device decided to prioritize something in the OS and your latency just quadrupled--sucks to be you.") to the Audio system on iOS is infuriating.

However, at least it's possible on iOS. On Android, not so much.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#156

Post by qppo »

varispeed wrote: post #151
qppo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's from my experience. Ableton is optimised to cram as many plugins onto a single thread as possible, which means you are quickly going to run out of processing power when using more CPU demanding plugins, because as soon as you exhaust one cpu core, the project will no longer play in real time. When plugins run from their own process, the OS take care of distributing the load across multiple cores and that lets yo…

It shows how slow your CPU's single threaded performance is and the trade off between latency and throughout in modern computing more than anything.

My experience from actually writing low latency schedulers in user space as well as the publicly available material - like in Ardour - suggests different conclusions from yours.

Keep in mind that a naive benchmark like "cpu usage" is entirely meaningless. What you look at is round trip latency required for a threshold of underruns/missed deadlines. Threading requires additional latency, and process synchronization even more. While I'm sure you report fewer underruns when splitting off into sandboxed plugins I'm suspicious if it's hitting the same performance as doubling or tripling the buffer size in terms of latency in the first place.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#157

Post by gavinray »

Fractal_HQ wrote: post #62
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.

Depending on your use-case there are a lot of options to consider before investing in a professional solution like Ableton Live. - LMMS[1]: The go-to cross-platform FOSS DAW solution, with VST support and a healthy community. - Ardour[2]: Much like LLMS, it's a classic Open Source project that runs cross-platform and is quite fully-featured. - VCVRack[3]: A brilliant FOSS EuroRack Simulator. It has a built-in package…

Do you have a recommendation for someone on Linux interested in producing EDM/House that has zero prior experience/equipment?

I have Reaper and Ardour, but a friend suggested Bitwig.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#158

Post by breakfastduck »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #134
lostgame wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speaking of instruments, after purchasing the Native Instruments Kontakt piano plugins: The Giant, The Maverick, The Grandeur, The Gentleman and Una Corda - I can never go back to the instruments provided with the DAW. The NI instruments mentioned above are just so head and shoulder above the rest, imo. My favorite is The Giant using either the "emotional" or "intimate" preset. Feel free to tweak those presets if you…

The Giant emotional preset is fantastic.

Really is miles ahead of any piano sounds included in any DAW I’ve tried.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#159

Post by andrepd »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #22
dmicah wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drag the mp3 onto an audio track, and turn on / adjust the warp settings to set it to the correct tempo.

Thank you for the advice. But even that sounds difficult for a novice like me. How do I "adjust warp settings" so that two tempos are the same? And I don't want to just have the same tempo, I want to align specific beats. I know there is a forum and documentation but if all my time goes to trying to figure out technical solutions then all my creativity goes into finding technical solutions, rather than solving artist…

Just like a violinist must spend time with such boring things as tuning the instrument, replacing strings, caring for the bow, learning correct posture, playing scales literally tens of thousands of times... etc.

Software is just another tool, like a painter's brushes or a musician's instrument.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#160

Post by whatch »

bsder wrote: post #155
whatch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blame Google. Android has a craptastic audio stack and only Google can fix it. Google would have to rip the heart out of Android and fix it for real time programming properly like OS X did way back in like 10.2?. However, don't get me wrong, iOS isn't great--it's just at least possible. The fact that you can't actually send a defined packet (just a bag of bytes and you don't know how many until the call--"HAH! HAH! Y…

> Android has a craptastic audio stack

Didn't know. Looks like I'm little closer to replacing my android with iphone

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