Ableton Forum

hi
what is the orange dot anyway i see it alot but i dont know what it means
thanks

It represents the play position or something like that. Its something I pay no heed to and cant really work out its use. Maybe someone else can explain exactly what its use is or more to the point how useful

I had my first orange dot the other day and couldn't figure out what the hell it meant. It came and went for a while and didn't seem to make any difference to the cheesy 70's track I was warping.

it's a UFO
Unidentified Fucking Orangedot!

It indicates how far off yr clip's start point is from 1 as defined by the global tempo/quantize situation. When you're in the studio, it's a reminder to stop and re-cue yr clip within the global quantize.

Apparently when you're playing live it just exists to remind you how powerless you are to do anything about it.

its a bad mistake, poorly thought through in development and barely understood by users, it follows no real logic and it serves its intended purpose incredibly badly.

I'll tell you what it does then you can ponder its mystery.

It supposedly shows the offset of the beat from the first beat of the bar, so if you set your nudge value to a 1/4 then nudge once the orange dot is over the marker 1.2.
press "keep" and the start marker fixes itself where the orange dot was. So now your clip will start where you nudged the start to. great eh!
so far so good.

try nudging 5 times from the inital position, wheres the F.O.D now? is it over marker 2.2 like you would expect? no, it's over 1.2. try nudging 8 times from the initial position, is it over marker 3? no, it's at marker 1.

How about this one ...
In a four bar clip with nudge value set to 1/4 bar. press once = position 1.2, press twice = position 1.3 , press 3 times = position 4.4 !!!

try the popular sport of DJing, play two versions of a track next to eack other, set the nudge value to 1 bar and nudge one version 24 bars ahead of the other, now imagine you want to keep this offset you have managed. How do you do it, the 'keep' button is greyed out. stop live session and start it again, the offset is lost, imagine that was a whole complex mix you had worked out.

The whole thing is a mess IMO

I'm not really a 5-hater, but you're totally right Angstrom. It's so far off the mark that they should quietly fix it in 5.2.1 or something. I really hope they don't let it go until 6.

Thanks for explaining Angstrom. I agree with you its a badly thought out plan which will hopefully change when version six arrives.