Metaclips - explained in pictures!

[Poster]

this is how I always imagined how it would look/work.. well, sort of, its very complicated matter if you take all variables into account..

you have this Session clip where you could drag other clips into,
or create such a clip by dragging a selection of clips into a Session slot..
then it works exactly the same as in the Arranger; select/drag different chunks freely on a timeline..
in this case the timeline is inside the clip and can be extended or cropped..




an often heard critique about Live is that some people regard Live/Session, as just a looper..
and while this isn't necessarily true, the fact that Session clips can only hold one, static source of content* doesn't build a strong case against such critiques..
(* you can however consolidate different sources in the Arranger and drag that back to Session but that's absolutely not the same..)

I personally never arrange songs in Session because I do a lot of editing so I have to use the Arranger..
and that's a shame really because I then cannot use the power of Session's non-linearity..

[breakphreak]

how cool with such an approach one can even combine MIDI and Audio Clips (the goal for 2020)

just kidding. mixing audio and midi on a single track is a bad habbit. looks very usable. any potential inconsistencies? it's not about nested clips exactly (with envelope tweaks etc), only audio.

[chapelier fou]

I've not read the whole thread, but what I would find very very nice is :
"Follow action meta clip" ( ). By this I mean having a group of follow action clips, but only taking one single cell. A bit like grouping tracks, but in a vertical way.
Let me explain my personnal use :
I trigger every clip with a monome : one button, one clip. Exactly as APC40 or whatever. I wish I could use a lot of random follow actions to my drums to have unpredictable drum parts, but I don't, because it would "eat" a lot of clip cells, so a lot of buttons. Does it make sense to you?
(what I do is : trigger with a dummy clip which has the same midi assignement as a follow action group, placed far away out of the screen).
Maybe it's another FR ?

[alex.the.forge]

that'll not be the same because you're then rearranging bits of the same source..
the abillity of rearranging bits of different sources is what makes this interesting..

it would be combined with the ability to copy/paste - so you could copy a "slice" from another clip

I think maybe the idea is not much different to what you have shown, but i can't imagine having the coloured title-bars that are at the top of arrange clips inside session clips, but maybe if just the background of the "slices" (between warp markers or transients) could be coloured that would make more sense

[yur2die4]

dizzang! I should have looked for this before i posted haha.


+1 absolutely. It would make Live infinitely more appealing to those producer/dj types. Sample accurate offsets and arrangement of smaller audio pieces in session view would allow people to Make music more fluently with Live's prized layout

[phonographist]

Just wanted to add my vote for something like this. Cubase has it, so why not Live? I would switch from cubase to Live directly!

And about the nesting problems, couldn't they just make it to that it's forbidden to put meta-clips into other meta-clips? I mean, you would't want to do that really anyway, right?

[jbodango]

I like where this is going but I could also seeing it becoming extremely cumbersome.

breakphreak - it def looks like a flyweight/composite type of solution. however, i imagine it would get pretty nasty code-wise. pointers to groups of pointers to pointer groups to pointers

At first it takes a little bit of disicplne to force ctrl + j into your workflow, but i think ultimately it yields significant productivity and actually helps you move forward with getting the song/project done.

[Angstrom]

At first it takes a little bit of disicplne to force ctrl + j into your workflow, but i think ultimately it yields significant productivity and actually helps you move forward with getting the song/project done.

not really, not if you plan on using the 'block' to form only the basis of the later iterations.
When I write - the second "verse" only spends a very little time being exactly the same as the first, then I make alterations. With a flattened audio file I would not be able to make any changes. For some types of music that is fine, but not for my kind of music.

In my music I like everything to be slightly different.
I don't like that block on-off-on-off stuff. It sounds lazy to me. Give me subtlety.

[alex.the.forge]

At first it takes a little bit of disicplne to force ctrl + j into your workflow, but i think ultimately it yields significant productivity and actually helps you move forward with getting the song/project done.

not really, not if you plan on using the 'block' to form only the basis of the later iterations.
When I write - the second "verse" only spends a very little time being exactly the same as the first, then I make alterations. With a flattened audio file I would not be able to make any changes. For some types of music that is fine, but not for my kind of music.

In my music I like everything to be slightly different.
I don't like that block on-off-on-off stuff. It sounds lazy to me. Give me subtlety.

how would cutting and pasting selections in the clip view work for you? I remember you saying once before you also sometimes use different warp modes for different slices, but maybe that would be one situation where a consolidate is necessary (i.e. "You are trying to copy a selection from a clip with different settings, would you like to consolidate the selection to fit the clip?"

I'm saying this really because my feeling is something like that is the more likely scenario

when I've seen the mock-ups I just haven't been able to visualise something like that making it into Live.

I mean, some kind of "clip freeze" may work (or "freeze selected clips") but it would really just be like consolidating and you would still have to unfreeze in arrange to make edits I think

I'm just saying I think Ableton would go for something as simple as possible and the mockups just look a bit too much like change for me to believe it could happen

cut/paste, maybe with some colours to differentiate seems the most likely to me

[Angstrom]

how would cutting and pasting selections in the clip view work for you? I remember you saying once before you also sometimes use different warp modes for different slices, but maybe that would be one situation where a consolidate is necessary (i.e. "You are trying to copy a selection from a clip with different settings, would you like to consolidate the selection to fit the clip?"

I'm saying this really because my feeling is something like that is the more likely scenario

when I've seen the mock-ups I just haven't been able to visualise something like that making it into Live.

I mean, some kind of "clip freeze" may work (or "freeze selected clips") but it would really just be like consolidating and you would still have to unfreeze in arrange to make edits I think

I'm just saying I think Ableton would go for something as simple as possible and the mockups just look a bit too much like change for me to believe it could happen

cut/paste, maybe with some colours to differentiate seems the most likely to me

I've never considered doing arrangement level actions at the clip level really, even within a 'metaclip'. Cutting, copying and pasting are re-arranging actions and I've always considered metaclips to be containers for re-arrangements.

record them back to arrangement and they are not consolidated, but 'loosely grouped' single clips. A metaclip slapped back into arrangement should still look like a lot of little normal clips, rather than one solid metaclip block. That would give flexibility to re-slice and dice.

but ...

Back in the real world
I know there are inherent problems in my daft idea. Lots of them

I'm fine if Ableton implement another solution rather than this weird concept, the important thing for me was to raise issues of use. Arranging, re-arranging, alternative arrangements, using session during the arrangement phase, making arranging non-linear.

All this could be achieved by other means entirely : EG : vertically folding "group clips", this solution would be more Ableton-like, as it doesn't alter the established methodology much, it's very similar to horizontal grouping (so easy to understand) and it doesn't complicate the workflow and nesting like an metaclip ("arrangement in a clip") would.
I bet that's what they will actually do, now I think about it a bit more.

[breakphreak]

Actually, a metaclip might be a "simple" envelope of cross-faded audio clips (with Bezier curves). In both views, of course. Not sure this is too much to ask to eliminate the need for destructive editing (which also results in sound quality degradation).

[alex.the.forge]

how would cutting and pasting selections in the clip view work for you? I remember you saying once before you also sometimes use different warp modes for different slices, but maybe that would be one situation where a consolidate is necessary (i.e. "You are trying to copy a selection from a clip with different settings, would you like to consolidate the selection to fit the clip?"

I'm saying this really because my feeling is something like that is the more likely scenario

when I've seen the mock-ups I just haven't been able to visualise something like that making it into Live.

I mean, some kind of "clip freeze" may work (or "freeze selected clips") but it would really just be like consolidating and you would still have to unfreeze in arrange to make edits I think

I'm just saying I think Ableton would go for something as simple as possible and the mockups just look a bit too much like change for me to believe it could happen

cut/paste, maybe with some colours to differentiate seems the most likely to me

I've never considered doing arrangement level actions at the clip level really, even within a 'metaclip'. Cutting, copying and pasting are re-arranging actions and I've always considered metaclips to be containers for re-arrangements.

record them back to arrangement and they are not consolidated, but 'loosely grouped' single clips. A metaclip slapped back into arrangement should still look like a lot of little normal clips, rather than one solid metaclip block. That would give flexibility to re-slice and dice.

but ...

Back in the real world
I know there are inherent problems in my daft idea. Lots of them

I'm fine if Ableton implement another solution rather than this weird concept, the important thing for me was to raise issues of use. Arranging, re-arranging, alternative arrangements, using session during the arrangement phase, making arranging non-linear.

All this could be achieved by other means entirely : EG : vertically folding "group clips", this solution would be more Ableton-like, as it doesn't alter the established methodology much, it's very similar to horizontal grouping (so easy to understand) and it doesn't complicate the workflow and nesting like an metaclip ("arrangement in a clip") would.
I bet that's what they will actually do, now I think about it a bit more.

I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by vertically folding 'group clips' - do you mean in session view, selecting a row of clips vertically and folding them into one? That would be cool

In the arrange view I envisage it being not a lot different to how freeze currently works, just being on clip level rather than the whole track

and then the ability to cut/copy/paste inside clips would provide a lot of editing flexibility in both views

but as I think about it, there would need to be some way of visually representing the edits. I said before that colours might be an option, but I almost think it needs a different edit view - like another button near L, S, E (launch, sample, envelope) that opens an editor view where you could maybe have something similar to warp markers, but maybe on the bottom to make it clear they are different and they dont time stretch, they just let you treat everything between transients as 'slices' that you can move around.

You could argue that you can do this already by slice to midi track using transients, but it sounds like the main issue you have with working this way is you like to see everything as audio

but then angstrom, I know you have been around the block, and once upon a time you would have done all of this with probably an atari ST and an S-900 or similar...... maybe you just need to remember your roots and get used to slice to midi and the Simpler!

[kavabanga]

my only wish is - make every key customizable like it's in logic. assign function to key/ change functions that assigned to key, etc... And you made great kinda step editor that i can operate with keyboard only. I would like Live to operate with keyboard only i really want to put my mouse away. Thnx in advance!