LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

[Tone Deft]

Very sad that Ableton seem to be just hoping this goes away. Particularly with most of the new features in 9 being more studio-oriented than performance-oriented, it seems very short-sighted to not fix this.

how long have you used Live? has the interweb now affected your hearing?

[H20nly]

the emails i get from Ableton don't have a section entitled "Things we hope will happen". should i write an email to support to get that turned on, or is it something i can change in my account settings?

[paulmaddox]

how long have you used Live?

Since v6

has the interweb now affected your hearing?

Not that I'm aware of

[kent_sandvik]

I don't have access to the Ableton Live internals code but one option is to have two modes, live mode and DAW editing mode where the clip view is in live mode by default and the editing mode in the other mode. The PDC is then compensated accordingly, if plug-ins with long latency is an issue in live mode , such as PSP VintageWarmer, then such PDC delay requests are just ignored using a threshold of a short delay for the rest of the audio tracks. In the editing mode then again such requests are honored -- as I know of few DJs that use the editing view for DJ:ing. And it could of course be changed via the preferences.

[paulmaddox]

the emails i get from Ableton don't have a section entitled "Things we hope will happen". should i write an email to support to get that turned on, or is it something i can change in my account settings?

Hence my use of the word "seem". A lot of noise about a problem over a long period of time with no indication of any attempt to address it one way or the other would make it seem like it is being ignored.

[sdfak1234]

I don't have access to the Ableton LIve internals code but one option is to have two modes, live mode and DAW editing mode where the clip view is in live mode by default and the editing mode in the other mode. The PDC is then compensated accordingly, if plug-ins with long latency is an issue in live mode , such as PSP VintageWarmer, then such PDC delay requests are just ignored using a threshold of a short delay for the rest of the audio tracks. In the editing mode then again such requests are honored -- as I know of few DJs that use the editing view for DJ:ing. And it could of course be changed via the preferences.

audio plugins are already compensated. it's the automation that's the problem. This too has already been discussed at length, there is no need for a producer/DAW mode, audio is already delayed. In 'DJ' mode.

[Tone Deft]

paulmaddox -

sorry to come off like a smart ass, do you kinda see where I'm coming from?

I should explain... I hit this problem before I realized what it was and I stopped working on the track. I went to an older version and restarted from there. now that I know why that track got screwy I can use Live accordingly. it'd be nice to be able to any damn thing I wanted with Live but now I know better. of course it'd be nice if it was fixed. am I going to yell and scream at an interweb forum about it? no.

mostly my automation is static, so it's rarely an issue. some rely heavily on automation and big ass racks. why do that if it doesn't sound right? whatever, it's their studio, their fun.

there's been some good discussion... and some not-so-good ones.


re: "seem". it was a design decision they made years ago. in another thread they post about this invoking latency through Live and they wanted a low latency DAW, it's a live performance tool. sometimes the forum butts heads over this duality of Live, some want more live stuff, some want more production stuff. it's tough to be everything to everyone.

[sdfak1234]

the emails i get from Ableton don't have a section entitled "Things we hope will happen". should i write an email to support to get that turned on, or is it something i can change in my account settings?

Hence my use of the word "seem". A lot of noise about a problem over a long period of time with no indication of any attempt to address it one way or the other would make it seem like it is being ignored.

This issue is a bit like Pandora's box for them, but silence is the WRONG decision. It's too late for me now because I've already back switched to Cubase, but if they hadn't of been silent about it then maybe I would've given them more time... I mean I'd have loved it if henke took me from 60 to 0, but he's gonna have to have a better rationale than the one had in 2009. My only assumption is that's on the list but development is going too slowly and as others have stated, poor design decisions in the past leading to failure today... I think it's funny how people talk about dj mode and producer mode, I think Live has progressed too slowly in both regards.

The fundamental flaw of Ableton Live is perpetual incompleteness. It proposes features and never finishes them, over and over again.

[sdfak1234]

If they had a button in preferences that said 'compensate automation' and I knew it incurred additional latency, I can deal with that. no need for modes.

[paulmaddox]

@Tone Deft

I completely see where you're coming from, and I'm in a similar boat - have adapted my workflow to avoid hitting the problem regularly, and am aware of it enough to spot when it causes problems. It certainly isn't stopping me from using Live on a daily basis, but is moderately annoying.

I take slight umbrage to the implication that discussing and expressing my disappointment in ableton's lack of response is "yelling and screaming on a forum" though, particularly from someone who's post-count suggests they do rather more of it than me. I suspect you were intending to be inflammatory though, so I shan't bite any more

[Tone Deft]

you're being judgmental. we should talk about the topic at hand and not each other. that's basically my point. you've been cool, others, not so much.

[simpli.cissimus]

I like to mention that Ableton released Live 8 with fully working PDC !

You can go back to the manual of first releases, mine was 8.01,
and look your self. No word of not fully working PDC.

They added notes in later releases, after people complained about the PDC.

Ableton didn't fix the PDC problem, they fixed the manual...

[dolomick]

I was thinking of switching back to Live after many years of not using it, but this issue seriously scares me. Can someone summarize how to avoid these timing issues in Live, so I can then evaluate if these so-called workarounds are acceptable to me?

From what I gather, the main thing seems to be avoiding using plugins like Stutter Edit *after* compressors and latency inducing plugins. I've also read to put compressors near the end of racks and to use small lookahead values. What else should I do to avoid timing issues, or is what I just wrote the crux of it?

I'm wondering how all the EDM artists use live without going crazy fixing timing issues. I use a lot of soft synths and don't really use external gear so hopefully that is a good thing for this issue.

Thanks in advance, once I understand what switching to Live may entail, I can make an educated decision about returning to it.

[hec]

Sorry you can't hire timing problems

no, but you can purchase them in both standard and Suite versions.

It's ALL about compromises folks. Adding PDC could be the death of Ableton for live environments, who knows. These are some of the best programmers in the industry, people who use Ableton to make music day in and day out themselves so why would they omit something so important? The answer is compromises. If you want stability you can't have a feature sucking up all the resources, computers aren't THAT good yet.

I can't say it enough, there should be an Ableton Pro that cost more and does more. It can be the studio version that makes compromises the other way around. IMO Live is too powerful a production tool (might I say the best) to pigeonhole itself as simply a performance program. It might have started that way but clearly things have changed. Companies have to adapt and grow, I wonder when we'll see Ableton do that to some capacity.

All these threads are battles between people who know what they're missing and people who could care less and want to tell the other side how much what they want doesn't matter.

Ableton Pro will be the end of that. If it doesn't matter to you, don't pay the premium.

Of course that's when those people will suddenly care are start complaining why pro features aren't included in the regular version blah blah blah.

[pencilrocket]

This issue somehow affects the reason why deadmau5 is trying to move his studio system to Cubase?