Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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keykeeper
Posts: 30
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2009 7:06 am

Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by keykeeper » Wed Nov 04, 2009 11:38 am

Hi - I am about to start a long lasting serious project and I am hoping to use Ableton Live for this but unfortunately there are a few issues which prevents me at the moment. I really hope to use Ableton because the midi editor and editing in general is superior to e.g Reaper. I.e in Reaper I get midi latency whilst in Live it is perfect:)

The issues are:
1) I use Line6 toneport ux2 interface and when I have two or three tracks with this vst plugin I get audio drop outs etc.. I do not get this in E.g Reaper. Anyone know what I can do to improve Ableton performance with regards to vst efficiency?

2) I also read a few places that Ableton is best used for live situations and not for professional studio recording which is aimed to be distributed. Can anyone pleaes negate this?

3) I also read somewhere that I consolidating items on a track in ableton can this have an effect on the final sample's quality-is this correct?

4) One final issue - sometimes the vst user interface will "disappear" if it is opened in front of Ableton Live.The OS is XP - Any fix for this?

Thanks

necho
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Location: (y)UK

Re: Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by necho » Wed Nov 04, 2009 12:30 pm

keykeeper wrote:
2) I also read a few places that Ableton is best used for live situations and not for professional studio recording which is aimed to be distributed. Can anyone pleaes negate this?
Duly negated. This is not true. Ableton is best for live situations (i.e. its better than anything else) but anyone who tells you its audio engine is "not pro" is talking shite.
keykeeper wrote:
3) I also read somewhere that I consolidating items on a track in ableton can this have an effect on the final sample's quality-is this correct?
Warping can affect quality. Consolidating does not
keykeeper wrote:
4) One final issue - sometimes the vst user interface will "disappear" if it is opened in front of Ableton Live.The OS is XP - Any fix for this?
?

you can choose whether the interface appears automatically when you load a vst... its in the settings.... I'm not sure I understand what your asking though.

Reaper is great - I love it. It's audio engine is amazing and its REALLY tightly coded. I love how customizable it is too.

But if you want to use Live, use Live.
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Dexes
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Location: Vienna / AT

Re: Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by Dexes » Wed Nov 04, 2009 12:42 pm

keykeeper wrote: 4) One final issue - sometimes the vst user interface will "disappear" if it is opened in front of Ableton Live.The OS is XP - Any fix for this?
In the preferences there's a function call "auto hide plugin windows" or something like that. If it is set to on, live will only show the interface of vst's that are on the selected track. This can be usefull if you only have 1 monitor and use several vsts that have a large interface.
Just set the pref switch to off and the windows will stay open till you close them.

SWAN808
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Re: Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by SWAN808 » Wed Nov 04, 2009 2:39 pm

consolidating can affect the audio in 2 ways:

1. Normalization - a gain change which some prefer not to have
2. Sample rate change. IE if your audio is 88k and set is 44.1. Or vice versa. Ableton specify that for best audio quality do any sample rate conversion outside of Live. That said - Im not sure if upsampling causes degradation - it may just be downsampling.

Sadly the sample rate conversion in Live is not quite as good as most other DAWs.

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necho
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Re: Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by necho » Wed Nov 04, 2009 3:03 pm

SWAN808 wrote:consolidating can affect the audio in 2 ways:

1. Normalization - a gain change which some prefer not to have
2. Sample rate change. IE if your audio is 88k and set is 44.1. Or vice versa. Ableton specify that for best audio quality do any sample rate conversion outside of Live. That said - Im not sure if upsampling causes degradation - it may just be downsampling.
OK - fair enough - normalization is a matter of taste... and I always do sample rate conversion in Audio Finder.

to rephrase: Consolidation in the context of standard audio editing shouldn't affect the sound :)
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keykeeper
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Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2009 7:06 am

Re: Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by keykeeper » Wed Nov 04, 2009 8:22 pm

Hi - thanks for the advises. Is there some way one can disable the normalization?

Also with regards to the disappearing vst user interface I have uploaded an image. This surely must be a bug..

http://www.handsup.se/ableton.jpg

d-track
Posts: 640
Joined: Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:29 pm

Re: Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by d-track » Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:27 pm

normalization doesnt affect the quality. you can turn don the sample volume. nothing to do with the quality.

sample rate conversion can be done separately in live _before_ consolidating and should be fine enough.

but you cant beat villalobos! :P
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adventurepants_
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Re: Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by adventurepants_ » Wed Nov 04, 2009 11:13 pm

keykeeper wrote:Hi - I am about to start a long lasting serious project and I am hoping to use Ableton Live for this but unfortunately there are a few issues which prevents me at the moment. I really hope to use Ableton because the midi editor and editing in general is superior to e.g Reaper. I.e in Reaper I get midi latency whilst in Live it is perfect:)

The issues are:
1) I use Line6 toneport ux2 interface and when I have two or three tracks with this vst plugin I get audio drop outs etc.. I do not get this in E.g Reaper. Anyone know what I can do to improve Ableton performance with regards to vst efficiency?

2) I also read a few places that Ableton is best used for live situations and not for professional studio recording which is aimed to be distributed. Can anyone pleaes negate this?

3) I also read somewhere that I consolidating items on a track in ableton can this have an effect on the final sample's quality-is this correct?

4) One final issue - sometimes the vst user interface will "disappear" if it is opened in front of Ableton Live.The OS is XP - Any fix for this?

Thanks
It all depends what you want to do.

When i do standard multitrack recording with live instruments, I do it with Reaper. I find the traditional sequencer concept works better for this, and I find Reaper much less fiddly to work with than Live for this stuff.

But if im just playing around with samples, and want to loop a live guitar over the top, and use the sequencer as a compositional tool, I go straight for Live and session view. If you want to do live remixing, then Live cannot be beat currently as far as commercial software goes.

Also, if youve got worse latency in Reaper than in Live, then youve got some settings screwed up somewhere. I get exactly the same midi latency on both sequencers.

The Toneport isnt really up to the job of being a proper audio interface if you want low latencies for soft synths.
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keykeeper
Posts: 30
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2009 7:06 am

Re: Ableton vs Reaper etc - Sound quality and efficiency

Post by keykeeper » Fri Nov 06, 2009 7:40 am

Thanks for all your advises:) I finally fixed the latency issue in Reaper by resetting the app to factory default. I will probably go for a mixed setup as you describe adventurepants_ . Just a final question - do you know if Reaper normalize when consolidating tracks as well?

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