Ableton Forum

@tecoio: To simply mic a live drum kit you would use 7 tracks more or less. That enough should prove you are wrong and so I'm not going to dignify the rest of your bullshit comment with more elaborate answer.

100+ tracks isn't that uncommon in a lot of larger studios. If you ever read Sound On Sound, some of the audio engineer reviews that they have show the DAW project view of some of these super large sessions. It's more than I'd find comfortable, but I dont think he should be slagged off for it.

That said, even in those those larger projects, the engineers make use of bouncing to audio and things like Freeze to free up CPU power. It's not just a Live issue, it's common sense if you want to run huge sessions like that. Expecting to run 80 or more tracks with active VSTi's and multiple plug ins without having a VERY fast computer is just asking to be disappointed.

Back on topic, very happy to see that we finally get retina fonts for things like the Operator window now per 9.2b2. Very quick update, nice.

Computing power is finite. That’s a fact of life. And in the past it has been MUCH worse and it didn’t keep people from making good music.

I think the bottom-line is people will never stop complaining. 50 years ago the biggest bands out there produced entire platinum albums with 4-track tape recorders in studios with VERY finite and expensive inventories of a few dozen effects and instruments.

Now we have multi-terabyte sample libraries, powerful soft-synths with unlimited polyphony and flexibility and DAWs able to handle dozens over dozens of tracks and it’s still not enough for some reason.

Once processing and software has improved enough to easily handle 100+ tracks, some producers from the future will still complain that they feel limited, and that any serious DAW should at least be able to handle 1000 tracks, mark my words.

But it's not a complaint about processing power, the responsability to buy the right computer is certainly on the user. It's about Live struggling with large sets even when the CPU use is only average.
And the more you route these tracks in interesting ways, the more it struggles!

Just as an example:

I like to use DrumRacks nested on DrumRack pads.

I also want to take the outputs of the sends of the inner DrumRacks and group them again for processing.

That makes for one DrumRack with 16 pads already 96 tracks (16 x 6)

Even if no vsts are loaded and each of the sends only contains a SimpleDelay it bogges down Live tremendously.

Deleted post.

Boah

The arrogant (uninformed!) smugness of people with very recent sign up dates....

Deleted post.

GridLights wrote:

TomViolenz wrote:Boah

The arrogant (uninformed!) smugness of people with very recent sign up dates....

I've been here on and off with different accounts, and mostly lurking, since 2008. So there goes your smugness out the window.

how so?!

And please tell, why the need for different accounts?!

Did you get too embarrassed by the nonsense you write?

TomViolenz wrote:
what are you trying to tell us?!
That people who use many tracks are unreasonable?

What could be unreasonable is to expect one DAW to be like any other when it comes to performance or that any MacBook should be able to handle 100 tracks or more with Live. 100 tracks of what? Audio is no problem usually, real-time CPU taxing softsynths may be.

I'm the first to want the performance of Live to be improved, but I also know Live isn't just any DAW. Maybe other DAWs are better for many people and if so they should use them.

But let's clarify what the performance issue is here. Is it loading and deleting taking a lot of time? That I agree with. That's very slow also with an SSD drive. Or is it that Live struggles with many audio tracks or a mix of softsynth and audio? I'm currently using a project with about 50 tracks on a 2014 MacBook Pro, most being audio but audio effects on most tracks. No performance issues there.

Also, more tracks doesn't indicate good focus nor high quality. I can see professionals using many tracks with layering as they typically know what they're doing, but I also see wanna-bes using many tracks as a way to cover the fact that their tunes are full of nothing. I've been given tracks to remix, only to find them empty of any quality whatsoever.

Stromkraft wrote:

TomViolenz wrote:
what are you trying to tell us?!
That people who use many tracks are unreasonable?

What could be unreasonable is to expect one DAW to be like any other when it comes to performance or that any MacBook should be able to handle 100 tracks or more with Live. 100 tracks of what? Audio is no problem usually, real-time CPU taxing softsynths may be.

I'm the first to want the performance of Live to be improved, but I also know Live isn't just any DAW. Maybe other DAWs are better for many people and if so they should use them.

Also, more tracks doesn't indicate good focus nor high quality. I can see professionals using many tracks with layering as they typically know what they're doing, but I also see wanna-bes using many tracks as a way to cover the fact that their tunes are full of nothing. I've been given tracks to remix, only to find them empty of any quality whatsoever.

TomViolenz wrote:Just as an example:

I like to use DrumRacks nested on DrumRack pads.

I also want to take the outputs of the sends of the inner DrumRacks and group them again for processing.

That makes for one DrumRack with 16 pads already 96 tracks (16 x 6)

Even if no vsts are loaded and each of the sends only contains a SimpleDelay it bogges down Live tremendously.

come again...

GridLights wrote:
Precisely. They have no idea why they're even using 100 tracks, or have the need to.

You seem to be stating this as fact. How do you know this?

GridLights wrote:Like someone mentioned, yes a drum kit could use 7 tracks in total. But what the hell for? Just to have delicate controls over the volume of each percussion?

Yes, that what people aim for. Some studios actually do have tens of different microphones so they could use different ones for different drum instruments - just to get that slightly different colour of a sound. Not to mention the whole art of setting up microphones properly and then they wire those microphones through different gear.

On Daft Punk's recent album some instruments were recorded on various microphones routed through various analogue gear, so they could choose the one that sounds best in the end.

Now, if you don't have that kind of gear you can at very least put each drum instrument on different track, group some of them and wire them through different effects, adjust volume, etc.

I'm not doing this myself, but that is the workflow of my music teacher.

GridLights wrote:Oh look, turns out you might just as well use a single track with the flexible drum rack that lets you control each sample's parameters.

And there you have it - you are writing from a perspective of a guy that assumes everyone just uses sampled drum kits. Further you assume that people barely ever have need to adjust volumes of individual instruments…

GridLights wrote:So there you have it, someone using 7 tracks for a single drum kit only does it because he doesn't know the more efficient way to achieve what he's going for, and then go around blaming other factors.

…

Of course I agree with everyone that talks about the limits of current CPUs, about freezing tracks etc. It's all true - I'm just referring my comments to people that claim that few tracks is enough for nearly everybody.

TomViolenz wrote:Just as an example:

I like to use DrumRacks nested on DrumRack pads…

come again...

And what performance do you get from other DAWs where you build drum racks?

Stromkraft wrote:

TomViolenz wrote:Just as an example:

I like to use DrumRacks nested on DrumRack pads…

come again...

And what performance do you get from other DAWs where you build drum racks?

I use only Live and I'm not sure if this workflow would even be possible in any other DAW.

What does that have to do with anything though?

I wonder what do those audio engineers use these for.

I'm thinking… maybe controlling space shuttles as surely nobody needs these many tracks for making music…