Live data from Hacker News

Ableton Live 11

ableton.com

161–170 of 268 posts

Re: Ableton Live 11

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if all my time goes to trying to figure out technical solutions Any musician has to learn their instrument. Commit to that.

> Any musician has to learn their instrument I don't have the time or resources to 'commit to that". Ableton Live is NOT my instrument, I would like to just use it as a tool. It takes years of practice to learn any musical instrument and become a musician that other people would want to listen to. Maybe the same applies to Ableton? It takes years of hard practice to master it? If so it would be proper that their sale…

Agreed with siblings that Ableton is a powerful tool and powerful tools aren't trivial to learn. Nobody expects to come in proficient on day one for ProTools, or Avid, or SolidWorks, etc.

That said it's totally fair to not have the time to commit to learning a complex tool. There are other, more accessible DAWs out there you can use if you don't need the power this one provides. Garageband, for example, is easy to use and straightforward. Curious if folks know other ones similarly easy to use.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#162

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

You can stop using Apple hardware for no additional software cost if you use Ableton.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything Adobe makes When Lightroom moved from v6 (iirc) to Creative Cloud a stunning amount of functionality seems to have been lost for the sake of making it idiot friendly.

I was really let down when Adobe After Effects removed the ability to randomize "effect groups" (for lack of a better name, basically a group of layered effects that creates a single, easily recognizable effect, such as "grainy movie film"). I spent so many hours playing with that thing. Don't get me wrong, I still do, but now I have to make all those tweaks manually instead of rolling the dice and hoping for a gem.…

I haven't used AE myself, but I use many of the other Adobe products and I know that many (perhaps all or close to all) of them have scripting support, so I decided to do a quick Google search for AE scripting guides.

A couple of results came up, one is an official PDF about scripting AE CS6, the other a website about AE scripting. I assume most of the stuff from the AE CS6 PDF applies to AE CC as well.

https://blogs.adobe.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/48/files/2012/0...

https://docs.aenhancers.com

From the PDF:

> When you use Adobe After Effects, you create projects, compositions, and render queue items along with all of the elements that they contain: footage, images, solids, layers, masks, effects, and properties. Each of these items, in scripting terms, is an object. This guide describes the ExtendScript objects that have been defined for After Effects projects.

I think it might be worthwhile to look into whether scripting might be used in order to randomize effects and effect parameters. My immediate guess would be that yes it would be possible. I didn't look into it closely, and if it turns out to be a dead end then I apologise for that but anyways I figured I might mention this in case it might be useful to you. Also, of course since I didn't look into it closely I can not make any guesses as to how much work it would take to get the type of functionality that you want.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#164

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, dar…

Quite off topic, but: where would a person go nowadays to get up to speed about music making? (Learning, news, etc).

I used to tinker with beatmaking back when fl studio was still called fruity loops, and this post has made me very nostalgic. I would like to get back as a hobby, but it's been like 15 years and I'm quite lost.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#165

I have version 9 and have difficulty figuring out how to do simple things with it. Like how do I take an existing MP3 recording and make it one of the tracks but synchronize the beats with those of the existing tracks?

The official Ableton YouTube channel has dozens of very short tutorials. It’s helped me a lot.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, rath…

You should check out bitwig studio on a Surface tablet! They have had an optimized Multitouch UX mode for a few years now, and it looks pretty good.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 changi…

I'm pretty sure that you can do this with a Push using a fixed length clip. https://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/how-to-capture-the-p...

Can you not do it without the Push?

Re: Ableton Live 11

#168

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, dar…

Quite off topic, but: where would a person go nowadays to get up to speed about music making? (Learning, news, etc). I used to tinker with beatmaking back when fl studio was still called fruity loops, and this post has made me very nostalgic. I would like to get back as a hobby, but it's been like 15 years and I'm quite lost.

YouTube! Here are some people that I personally subscribe to and currently watch.

Blezz Beats (8.68K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/blezzbeats

Synth Mania (126K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSGAKoBpUJI5jrJLgFQxiiw

Rick Beato (1.93M subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJquYOG5EL82sKTfH9aMA9Q

Ave McRee (71K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/user/AveMcree

Dom Sigalas (23.5K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGGgrpgOZ-DMvjLSYxn8W3w

Accurate Beats (81.7K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoT0i4T3r3d4oYkdYQgZ4fg

Da Drank Kang (7.13K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD7cuqL0P3x8RGsLQxxTpAA

Poli Popo (3.55K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZv3Yw5jtvjwcrzJ90yscEw

JAde Wii ツ (36.2K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqjAXHR5DHTCahIHpg7vspg

Doctor Mix (486K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbzNcFN7cxA8HO18cTYyTfg

Swiftstyle (33.7K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHPY6JX3EBMo1N9SKIxNDmQ

Kirk State (1.05K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGGgt68KDkMsHaniWUhjbBw

Tube Digga (14.1K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCs9r5J_56ta_n_hI3RUcGw

You Suck at Producing (222K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCapo4XcpVOlTLkbKIDL0WlA

Marlow Digs - mpc head (27.4K subs) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXTqU3m3XZx_rWV_XaPiDcg

Re: Ableton Live 11

#169
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…

No, you'd end up with Fruity Loops

Re: Ableton Live 11

#170
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I am using i9 9900k @5GHz so I think it is quite fast. The plugins I use are CPU heavy and you can run limited number of them on a single core. I am not interested in low latency - I am running 1024 buffer, however I would like my projects to play smoothly even if there is latency. Ableton unfortunately does not work well with such use case as it won't parallelise where it could and sandboxing does just that and I can run more plugins, even if it seems less efficient.
Post reply on HN