Preventing clicks in locator jumps

[0x80]

When audio is playing and I jump to a locator which is also in the middle of some other audio content, I get a click. This is expected when there is no interpolation happening, but is there no way to prevent this? It's great that live allows you to jump in a composition like that, but then I would expect it to take care of this issue that is inherent to jumping in audio content. Am I overlooking something?

[vitalispopoff]

Which locator do You mean?

The locator in a audio clip or a in an arrangement mode?

In the first case there's not much You can do about it - it's a bit like jumping from a one place to another in song played from CD - if there is a phase difference in waveform between the places You put locator from and to, then instant jump will cause the click. that's why for instance there is a fade curve for audio clips in arrangement mode (among other reasons by the way).

[0x80]

I meant the locators in the arrangement view.

I know why clicks occur when you jump in audio, but that doesn't mean that it can't be prevented in software by doing some sort of "smart" interpolation.

You're talking about crossfades in the arrangement view. I am using those, but they don't seem to solve anything when I jump *to* the locator from any other place. It's still a jump and to me it still sounds like most of the time a click occurs because of this.

I'm cutting up a composition in "scenes" for a stage play. The piece has constant background layers that I don't want to drop, but still I need to be able to jump to the next scene, because the timing will vary when played live. Because of this background I don't want to make a fade in.

How could crossfades help in this regards? Maybe I misunderstood you. I think I need Live to do some automatic crossfade when I jump to a locator, but I'm afraid it's not smart like that.

[vitalispopoff]

the clip fades soften the start and end of the clip, so even if the audio clip is cut in the middle of the wave, it's prevented from clipping.
The clipping caused by situation mentioned in my previous post may occur both: within the clip, and whole arrangement view, if the audio clips are used, as it doesn't change a thing in the playing them. The nature of the problem remains the same if You instantly jump from one cue point to another, and at the same time have the cue points set in the middle of the audio clips - that's how it works, and there's probably nothing to work it around.

e.g. - two cue points for one audio clip in arrangement view:


the same audio clip, but the fragment that was between the cue points is now deleted, and fades are disabled:


* * *

in order to avoid the clicks caused by these You'd probably have to use the fade ins and outs to soften the clip borders, but still this would introduce additional mess in the session, so it isn't rather worth considering

[fishmonkey]

I'm cutting up a composition in "scenes" for a stage play. The piece has constant background layers that I don't want to drop, but still I need to be able to jump to the next scene, because the timing will vary when played live. Because of this background I don't want to make a fade in.

do the background layers continue across scenes?

[0x80]

do the background layers continue across scenes?

Sometimes they do sometimes they don't. But jumping to a locator, even though its in the same background loop, makes a little click. I don't know when I will jump there so it won't be from an exact looping point.

I have now used a very short fadein in the arrangement clips at the point of the locator. Even though it's audible as a quick volume drop I think it's better than a click. Apparently when jumping to a locator Live does use some sort of fadeout on the playing audio buffer, because otherwise I would still expect a click because you jump from audio to no audio.

I wish Live had a feature to crossfade all layers with the next cue point over a given time. Say you quantize to one bar, and you hit the locator, it will take the time until the next bar to crossfade all tracks with the audio that is *just before* the locator, so that on the bar you will end up at exactly the right place at the right time, but having crossfaded to get there Has there been a feature request like this?? It would make it really cool for jumping back and forth in a composition.

Thanks for the replies so far.

[fishmonkey]

in the case where the background continues between scenes, you can avoid the problem by simply allowing the background to keep playing when the next scene launches.