LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
Cool Character
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by Cool Character » Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:12 am

Tone Deft wrote:you should be posting about PDC, not me.

it's just an internet forum, we're not drafting international trade laws. chill out.
That pretty funny, coming from someone wanting to hijack the topic to take shots at the people actually talking about PDC.

I'm pretty chill'd out. Just calling a spade, is all.

Mr-Bit
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by Mr-Bit » Wed Nov 07, 2012 7:56 am

At least the non effected posts keep the topic at the top, theres not much more to say its a known problem and well explained needs fixing and some users need to know about it.

sabiwa
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by sabiwa » Wed Nov 07, 2012 9:13 am

Hey! What if they just can't do anything about it. Meaning, they don't have the knowledge and wisdom to fix it. There's a limit between workmanship and talent. Is it too much to ask to replace your monome with Push and fiddle with updated Latin drums library...and feel for them?

Mr-Bit
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by Mr-Bit » Wed Nov 07, 2012 10:06 am

Well this flaw makes me less inclined to invest in push my apc40 doing me fine atm, I upgraded to suite that gives them a little more funds to carry on developing but push hmmmm think I'll wait and see.

pencilrocket
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by pencilrocket » Wed Nov 07, 2012 10:26 am

andydes wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong- audio pdc and automation pdc are completely different.

For audio pdc, you only have to worry about the total latency for each track. You add up the values then delay the final output for all the tracks to match the one with the longest. Live has always had a manual track delay. In programming terms this is a variable input point, so to implement pdc, they just had to input the pdc here and add it to the user defined track delay. Fairly straightforward.

Automation pdc is applied to the track being affected by the pluggin's latency. In order to line up, the delay for each line of automation needs to be calculated for the relevant pluggin's position in the chain. Importantly, live needs to be written to accept a timing adjustment at each point in the chain.

To me it looks like live 9 wasn't in fact the big rip up the old code rewrite many were hoping for. The issue is now well known enough for them to have addressed it if it was straightforward.

In the case of session automation, the reason given why it required a rewrite was because live could only handle one relative an one absolute modulation. But of course that's all anyone really asked for and that's what live 9 has.

Ok, that maybe all speculation. Carry on.
Yes, this thread is for that matters. Audio PDC can be achieved by aligning it at Mixer. But both Automation PDC and MIDI tempo clock PDC should be achieved at individual plugin wrapper and individual Live's Volume/Pan controller.

This is what people are expecting.

MrFingerDrums
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by MrFingerDrums » Wed Nov 07, 2012 11:23 am

H20nly wrote:^ you should get MrFingerDrums to help you. no telling how many logins you'll have if you sign him up.
makes no sense but tis expected of a forum dweller...very sad lonely people you know

andydes
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by andydes » Wed Nov 07, 2012 11:27 am

I know it's not the same as a fix, but is there a way in m4l to offset automation lanes and midi clock by a set (manual) amount for different devices?

That would be better than nothing and suggest that a native solution is at least possible.

MrFingerDrums
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by MrFingerDrums » Wed Nov 07, 2012 11:29 am

HAS ANYBODY NOTICED H20 & TONE DEFT'S WRITING STYLE ARE THE SAME

broc
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by broc » Wed Nov 07, 2012 12:37 pm

andydes wrote:I know it's not the same as a fix, but is there a way in m4l to offset automation lanes and midi clock by a set (manual) amount for different devices?

That would be better than nothing and suggest that a native solution is at least possible.
Yes, in m4l devices you can implement parameters to set such offsets and then manually adjust the timing within the current Live set. I'm actually using this method in particular for tempo-synced m4l devices. This is quite important in practice because all m4l devices by design introduce substantial latency. And if Live would report the latency at any point of the device chain, the timing adjustments of m4l devices could even be automated.

theophilus
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by theophilus » Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:28 pm

well, it is just the automation, like ableton said... any audio out-of-time effects are artifacts of the control signals being out of time. that said, if they already have the pdc problem solved, dunno why they can't add automation PDC - it really is not that complex of a problem, though it does have implications in how the automation is implemented. then again, not sure why they can't add poly aftertouch either - it's a simple midi message, so maybe there are other parts of their implementation that make changes like these difficult.

anyways, in the below, i duplicated a kick track between tracks 1 & 2. both have a volumeshaper on them (used only for the scope view here). a reverberate (w/4096 sample latency, but set to 100% dry, so no effect at all) was put into one of the tracks. the top volume shaper (on the right) is the original track, second one is the one with reverberate in the channel. you can see a significant delay between the two here; it clearly is not coming on the midi click. You can also see this on the top two channels of the oscope (which are in the channels, so 'see' the latency where they are).

However... I put an audio scope on a send (with both channels sending 100%) and the master (bottom two channels). You can see that in this case, ableton lined up the two tracks, and while they still aren't synchronized to the midi beat (they have an offset), they are synchronized to each other, mix together correctly and look the same. i didn't do utility but this is not a single sample offset; it would look massively different if they were being mixed offset from each other.

i just want to completely understand this issue correctly. The tempo sync one in particular is very bad; you can always shift automation around to get it correct, but there's no mechanism to shift around the midi clock. It is technically in sync with the tempo, but the start phase will always be off.


Image

crumhorn
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by crumhorn » Wed Nov 07, 2012 2:11 pm

That's a fascinating picture - I'm still trying to make sense of it.

edit

OK I see the PDC is delaying the first track to match the latency in the second. so everything is delayed equally relative to the system clock.

Anyway

PDC for automation is a completely different problem to PDC for audio.

VST plugins get time and tempo information by requesting it from the host application via a function call. It would be necessary to provide multiple hosting contexts each with it's own timing offset.

No idea how Lives devices work but I wouldn't mind betting it's very similar.

Obviously it can (and should) be done. But it's not such a trivial task as some people seem to think it might be.
"The banjo is the perfect instrument for the antisocial."

(Allow me to plug my guitar scale visualiser thingy - www.fretlearner.com)

broc
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by broc » Wed Nov 07, 2012 2:41 pm

theophilus wrote:i just want to completely understand this issue correctly. The tempo sync one in particular is very bad; you can always shift automation around to get it correct, but there's no mechanism to shift around the midi clock. It is technically in sync with the tempo, but the start phase will always be off.
Earlier on this thread Akshara provided a link to an official statement from Ableton.
It confirms the tempo sync issue and also explains how it could be solved.
.. timing depending plugins like camelspace or beatrepeat poll the transport timing information from the host to work correctly in time. In Live's case, as well with some other hosts, all plugins get the same global timing and normally this is just fine, of course - but as soon as such a timing depending plugin sits behind another plugin that causes latency, it would need its own special timing information that incorporates also the latency that gets introduced before it receives its data. But as i mentioned: Live does not offer this feature yet, just as it does not offer automation compensation - and both are pretty huge points on the feature wishlist.

theophilus
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by theophilus » Wed Nov 07, 2012 2:44 pm

yeah, you can see that the meters are not in time too.

interesting point about the vst midi clock - i don't know much about vst so didn't know how the automation/midi actually gets to the plugin. time to do some reading.

mostly i posted this to say, if you think you have an issue related to timing, that oszillos mega scope is a great tool... just drop it on a track (or multiple tracks) you think have an issue, and it is pretty obvious on the screen if you do or not.

crumhorn
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by crumhorn » Wed Nov 07, 2012 2:56 pm

theophilus wrote: that oszillos mega scope is a great tool...
Must check that out - looks quite useful.
"The banjo is the perfect instrument for the antisocial."

(Allow me to plug my guitar scale visualiser thingy - www.fretlearner.com)

theophilus
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Re: LIVE 9 : PDC IMPROVED OR NOT ?

Post by theophilus » Wed Nov 07, 2012 3:54 pm

here's another picture - this one, for drum racks:

Image

this is very similar to the above, except that in this case, it's in a drum rack. i just took the standard kit-909 classic from drum machines with a 4/4 pattern, and duplicated the kick chain. the volume shapers are not doing anything (flat) and the reverberate is set to 4096 samples, but 100% dry, so not doing anything but generating latency.

you can again see that the bottom volume shaper is seeing the automation out-of-sync issue (this is actually visible in the scope too - i guess i don't really need the volume shaper - incidentally, i don't know if you can still get oszillos, but volume shaper is also cheap and acts as a single-signal midi-synced scope - great for this!)

in the scope, the top two signals are at the chain, and you can see that there, they aren't in sync.
however, the third (green) signal is where both of them are sent to send, and the scope is the first effect in the send - here, they are synced, so ableton is compensating the send and aligning them. the last one (purple) is the overall output of the drum rack, which is mixing the two separate kicks and the return for the send chain (i reduced it a little bit in the mixer just to make it fit; because we're adding as we go, the bottom waveforms are louder than the bottom ones). and even the overall output of the drum rack is completely in sync.

at least for this simple case... i'd love to do some further testing, if someone has some specific cases where this doesn't work. so far, I've tried mixer sends, the master, and drum rack send/returns (i didn't see instrument send/returns, though i thought it had them?). that's everything i can think of, and at least for the simple cases, the audio is always in sync.

since they already have these values, it looks like each plugin asks the host for timing as it goes; the host needs to respond with a different value for every plugin, and maybe that's the piece of code that needs added.

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