Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
beef_wellington
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by beef_wellington » Wed Dec 14, 2011 3:48 pm

I have used MS and Live pretty extensively on stage. Soundflower will work for getting audio into Live, but I am wearing of linking the two programs using a freeware utility. Instead, I patch 2 outputs directly into inputs on my audio interface. I set up tons of keyboard patches in MS, set up a track in Live to receive the MS input, and route that to a bunch of looping tracks and effects racks. MS can host any 3rd party instrument I want, so any channel strips I use in Logic can be loaded and used in performance. I am able to get buffer sizes low enough that latency is not an issue.

The only issue I have encountered is with Mainstage hogging graphics resources. At times my display was greatly lagging (MS and Live) with both apps running. It never compromised audio performance however. I do really wish MS would run as a rewire slave. It would be much more useful live and in the studio, especially now that it is being sold as a separate app.

kanuck
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by kanuck » Wed Dec 14, 2011 7:26 pm

beef_wellington wrote:I have used MS and Live pretty extensively on stage. Soundflower will work for getting audio into Live, but I am wearing of linking the two programs using a freeware utility. Instead, I patch 2 outputs directly into inputs on my audio interface. I set up tons of keyboard patches in MS, set up a track in Live to receive the MS input, and route that to a bunch of looping tracks and effects racks. MS can host any 3rd party instrument I want, so any channel strips I use in Logic can be loaded and used in performance. I am able to get buffer sizes low enough that latency is not an issue.

The only issue I have encountered is with Mainstage hogging graphics resources. At times my display was greatly lagging (MS and Live) with both apps running. It never compromised audio performance however. I do really wish MS would run as a rewire slave. It would be much more useful live and in the studio, especially now that it is being sold as a separate app.
wouldn't this cause a lot of latency? you have the midi latency + 2 conversions of the same signl.

mholloway
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by mholloway » Wed Dec 14, 2011 8:03 pm

Personally I think the IAC & Soundflower routing requirements are a total pain in the ass. Frankly I think you guys are kinda downplaying the obnoxiousness of it all, but to each their own. For me it's a deal-breaker, i'll stick with regular plugin instruments, got enough of them anyway. If some of the above ideas ever get implemented so this shit doesn't require all these workarounds, then cool, I'm in.

-M
Last edited by mholloway on Wed Dec 14, 2011 8:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
my industrial music made with Ableton Live (as DEAD WHEN I FOUND HER): https://deadwhenifoundher.bandcamp.com/
my dark jazz / noir music made with Ableton Live: https://michaelarthurholloway.bandcamp. ... guilt-noir

mholloway
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by mholloway » Wed Dec 14, 2011 8:06 pm

milfhuntr wrote:
The problem is that Mainstage is really incompatible with Ableton as a plugin type of thing. I have tried multiple routing and it does not work well. So therefore I will simply have to buy Logic Pro. I will continue to use Ableton because I like the workflow but I am going to ease my way over to Logic Pro. Perhaps that was Apples intent by making Mainstage not work as a VST, I don't know. I only know the difference in sound is so stark and overwhelming to me, a user of Ableton for 3 years and never even touching Logic, that I have to make a change.

You're switching DAWS solely because of the bundled instruments??? 8O

that kinda blows my mind. do you even know if Logic will work for you as a functional DAW? It's very dated in many ways. And lacks tons of the sequencing functionality you've been using for the last 3 years...

-M
my industrial music made with Ableton Live (as DEAD WHEN I FOUND HER): https://deadwhenifoundher.bandcamp.com/
my dark jazz / noir music made with Ableton Live: https://michaelarthurholloway.bandcamp. ... guilt-noir

UncleAge
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by UncleAge » Wed Dec 14, 2011 8:35 pm

mholloway wrote:Personally I think the IAC & Soundflower routing requirements are a total pain in the ass. Frankly I think you guys are kinda downplaying the obnoxiousness of it all, but to each their own.
I can see where your coming from, but it's no different for me than some of the stuff I already do. Not every idea can work as a plugin. I like to use Glitch Sequencer and Zyklus Improvisor. Even if they were available as plugins they still wouldn't fair well in Live because of the silly limitation of Live's midi routing. As it stands the IAC buss works well in the studio for the most part. However, I'm not so sure I would want to depend on that type of setup on a stage in front of an audience.

The Soundflower part is not a bother at all for me. I use it every time I make screen videos. It makes routing all the audio a snap. As soon as I'm done I change things back to normal with a click in a selection box. It never feels like a hassle.

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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by Forge. » Thu Dec 15, 2011 1:00 am

I have been using the sound flower/IAC thing for Logic and Live, because using MIDI clock it's pretty tight and I am just using it to work out what I want then export as stems from Live.

I would think it wouldn't be as good for main stage because the latency/PDC may be more of an issue as the aim is for performance. That's just a guess though I haven't tried with Mainstage - just relaying my experiences with Logic.

Winterpark
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by Winterpark » Thu Dec 15, 2011 5:01 am

just wanna share my experience. I have Mainstage v1. which came with Logic Studio.

Years ago i tried the whole IAC and Soundflower thing. I found it pretty clunky and a bit frustrating, and sort of not really worth the effort.

That said, i do really like those logic instruments and plugins.

Since this recent forum talk, i thought i'd get it up and running again... to my surprise, with my new soundcard (Metric Halo 2882) and it's totally sweet routing options in Mio Console, here is absolutely no need for Soundflower at all! you just set up an IAC midi bus which you send from as if you would to an external synth, and route Mainstage's audio back through the Mio console into live with no noticable latency... well no more than you may get with an external synth.

it's making me consider the upgrade to Mainstage 2, but i may hold out till Logic 10 comes out and see if they do a new Mainstage3 with it.
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Machinesworking
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by Machinesworking » Thu Dec 15, 2011 9:25 am

the one thing people seem to forget here is you can rewire Live and Mainstage, it's just that for older projects with third party instruments in Live you would need to do the whole Soundflower routine etc.

broc
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by broc » Thu Dec 15, 2011 10:26 am

Machinesworking wrote:the one thing people seem to forget here is you can rewire Live and Mainstage, it's just that for older projects with third party instruments in Live you would need to do the whole Soundflower routine etc.
But don't forget that Live considers M4L as 3rd party plugin.

I think the ideal usage of MS would be standalone for playing instruments live.
Notice that MS (and Logic) has no midi input latency, in contrast to Ableton Live.

Machinesworking
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by Machinesworking » Thu Dec 15, 2011 11:25 am

broc wrote:
Machinesworking wrote:the one thing people seem to forget here is you can rewire Live and Mainstage, it's just that for older projects with third party instruments in Live you would need to do the whole Soundflower routine etc.
But don't forget that Live considers M4L as 3rd party plugin.

I think the ideal usage of MS would be standalone for playing instruments live.
Notice that MS (and Logic) has no midi input latency, in contrast to Ableton Live.
That really sucks ass. I don't own M4L. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation as far as the code is concerned, but it really limits the usefulness of M4L in Live. Cripples it really if you want to use another DAW rewired with Live. :x
Latency isn't the big issue to me, the big one is patch changing, and how Mainstage can change a whole slew of FX on top of the instrument with very little glitching and no fancy tricks. I've got Maistage 1 around here, I should mess around with it a bit to get an idea of what 2 can do. Not buying even a $30 App until I sell my Evolver.

Forge.
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by Forge. » Thu Dec 15, 2011 12:46 pm

am wrote: Years ago i tried the whole IAC and Soundflower thing. I found it pretty clunky and a bit frustrating, and sort of not really worth the effort.
One other point - I nearly gave up when trying it with MTC, it wasn't even close, but then with 'MIDI clock' instead it wasn't too bad.

broc
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by broc » Thu Dec 15, 2011 2:02 pm

Forge. wrote:
am wrote: Years ago i tried the whole IAC and Soundflower thing. I found it pretty clunky and a bit frustrating, and sort of not really worth the effort.
One other point - I nearly gave up when trying it with MTC, it wasn't even close, but then with 'MIDI clock' instead it wasn't too bad.
Generally I've found syncing DAWs with MTC or MIDI clock problematic because there is no global delay compensation.
So whenever you change the song on one of them you may have to re-adjust the sync delay parameters manually.

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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by Forge. » Fri Dec 16, 2011 12:33 am

broc wrote:
Forge. wrote:
am wrote: Years ago i tried the whole IAC and Soundflower thing. I found it pretty clunky and a bit frustrating, and sort of not really worth the effort.
One other point - I nearly gave up when trying it with MTC, it wasn't even close, but then with 'MIDI clock' instead it wasn't too bad.
Generally I've found syncing DAWs with MTC or MIDI clock problematic because there is no global delay compensation.
So whenever you change the song on one of them you may have to re-adjust the sync delay parameters manually.
Yeah - I don't know that I would use it for anything that needed it to be super tight - it's more for sketching Ideas in Live using a control surface like the launchpad to trigger clips so that I can then export them as stems into Logic.

beef_wellington
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by beef_wellington » Fri Dec 16, 2011 7:11 pm

wouldn't this cause a lot of latency? you have the midi latency + 2 conversions of the same signl.
Surprisingly it wasn't much of an issue. I was able to get buffer sizes low enough (64 in each app, if I recall correctly).
And I didn't even think to try FW bussing as mentioned previously. I also have a 2882.

djadonis206
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Re: Mainstage with Ableton - First Thoughts

Post by djadonis206 » Fri Dec 16, 2011 7:21 pm

Machinesworking wrote:the one thing people seem to forget here is you can rewire Live and Mainstage, it's just that for older projects with third party instruments in Live you would need to do the whole Soundflower routine etc.
Does MS rewire into Live or the other way around?

I'm curious
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