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Ableton Live 11

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241–250 of 268 posts

Re: Ableton Live 11

#241
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitwig already does that with VSTs IIRC

Yes and that works very well. You could also achieve this in Ableton by using jBridge (it was intended as a way to run 32bit plugins in 64bit DAW or other way around or to overcome the memory limits of a 32bit process) which runs plugins in separate processes and unintended consequence is vastly improved performance. I remember having projects that wouldn't play at all and played through jBridge without breaking a sw…

For other readers: It is a misconception that sandboxing per-se enables parallelism. On the contrary, it only hurts performance. The speedup observed with jBridge might have other reasons. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25068976

Re: Ableton Live 11

#242
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

For other readers: It is a misconception that sandboxing per-se enables parallelism. On the contrary, it only hurts performance. The speedup observed with jBridge might have other reasons. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25068976

Re: Ableton Live 11

#243

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…

> this could actually be solved by running plugins in separate processes.

Speaking as an audio developer, you would certainly not run things in a seperate process to achieve parallelism. Instead you would use a thread pool.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#244
post #34

What are the upgrade prices like? I might like to buy it, but I don't want a huge bill for upgrading every major version.

$229 for Suite upgrade. I love Live, but it’s getting harder to keep justifying additional money into it as a hobbyist. I might give Logic another go (purchased years ago and still getting free updates), even though it has always felt less intuitive to me than Live for whatever reason. Edit: I’ve seen other folks online posting a price of $183 for Suite upgrade, so I would just login and see what price they give you.…

This is why I ultimately switched over to FL Studio. I don't make money off of music, and with work and family rarely have the time to spend on it. Live's high upgrade costs seemed wasted on me. With FL Studio, it's a single lifetime licence. Mind you the UX is not nearly as nice as Live and it's much more geared to in-studio producing than live use, so obviously won't work for everyone.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not at all a hard thing to do in Max (and thus Max4Live), and it's also very easy to hook up midi controllers to let you steer it without ever looking at your laptop.

That's what I've been wondering and wanting to explore. Thanks for nudging me n that direction. Maybe I can do it all with Max and Live. Then I'd be up for it all. Have you or do you know of someone who has done something like this?

Hi Joe, you will probably find more resources on the Max side. Lots of people build things like this and talk about them on the Max forums, and then they can be run either in Live (as M4L devices) or aside live (syncing and piping audio in over soundflower or similar) or both. The Cycling 74 forum and the Max/MSP facebook group have a lot of traffic and helpful posts. For whatever reason it seems like those are more active for what you're talking about than the actual max4live pages/forums, which are generally more about using devices than building them. There are some differences when you run something in max 4 live, but they are pretty small and not hard to figure out (i.e. Live owns the tempo, you have access to live DOM, etc). I would highly recommend the Cipriani and Giri books on Max, which will give you everything you need to get your loop controller working just as you want it! It's definitely doable. When I was doing shows with Live, I basically never used the Ableton UI after setting up my device chains and midi maps, all realtime interaction was through my own scripts and objects. Good luck! maybe see you on the forums. :-)

Re: Ableton Live 11

#246
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just had a lot of fun playing this! Thanks for sharing. I've been working on a wavetable synth VST, but also have been looking at web APIs to do something similar to this. Thanks for the write up.

Hey thanks! I was actually experimenting with web GL to build a similar instrument as Ableton's wave table! But I'm not full time, so it's taking forever...

I know how that goes, best of luck!

Re: Ableton Live 11

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't "appear" to plug it, I plug it. Are you the person in charge of what's OK? Why do you think it's vaporware? How long do you think it takes to write a DAW?

> I don't "appear" to plug it, I plug it If you had something to contribute to the discussion and then plug your project, then I'd say you're just plugging it. But you're not. You're just "appearing" in threads to plug you project. It's not a side-effect of your comment, it's the entirety of your comment. Hence "appear > plug" instead of just "plug". And no, I'm not in charge of what's OK, just telling you that peopl…

Vaporware means something that has no chance of being released. My project doesn't fall into his category.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#248
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…

It looks like a good update, but I'm starting to give up hope on seeing ARA2 as a feature... :-( Something that wasn't a problem for $200 Logic Pro or even $60 Reaper (with their two-person dev team).

I am consistently pleasantly surprised by the way Apple consistently updates Logic with only more and more layers of impressive features. ARA2 support was fantastic - so was their buyout of Camel's Alchemy.

Alchemy alone added a ton of value to Logic, and it came as a .x upgrade. Fantastic.

EDIT: One of the only selling points of an iPad I can think of is using it on a stand with Logic Remote as an actual digital mixing window. The experience is unparalleled.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#249

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.

I went through the same transition about a year ago. I hadn't touched music making for about a decade before that (had kids).

It is kind of overwhelming because the options are huge. Also, we're in a resurgence of electronic music hardware right now, which is super exciting but also ramps up the paradox of choice and analysis paralysis.

However, we have two things going for us: 1. Most music software has free demos or inexpensive lightweight versions. 2. The used hardware market is very strong so you can recoup most of the cost if you sell something (especially if you bought it used).

This means it's relatively feasible to sort of incrementally explore the space and see what works for you. I do think you have to treat it as an exploration. Unlike other music genres, electronic music lends itself to very personalized workflows. The gear and software you have and how you have it all set up is a big part of the creative process. Also, the user experience of hardware and software affects the music you make in profound ways that are hard to predict. You have to just sort of try stuff and see what gels with you.

I'd suggest:

1. Research the artists you like to see how they make their music. You can usually find video interviews with them, often in their studio.

2. Watch YouTube videos for the gear they use and see which things look inspiring.

3. Acquire a piece of it and give it a try. Make sure to force yourself to sink enough time to get past the initial learning curve.

4. If you like it, keep it. Otherwise, sell it and move on. Either way, go back to step 1.

Finding the right balance between just playing around, working to finish songs, and tinkering with your set up is a continuing challenge. Be mindful of it (i.e. don't just fetishize gear acquisition, or grind so hard you take the fun out of it) and you'll be OK.

Re: Ableton Live 11

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reason is quite possibly the king of skeumorphic design, across all software categories and all time. https://www.reasonstudios.com

For good and ill. Mostly good (I really love it), but treating knobs as weird faders is one place the metaphor breaks and it took me a long time to get used to it.

Yeah, I'm with you. The UI has a sort of fun appeal, but in practice it's not actually that usable when you know what you want to do and want to move quickly.
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