Newbie help needed on looping...i'm nearly there!

[Nick Waine]

What I am trying to do is simple....I want to be able to record some audio which is not to any tempo, then extract a couple of bars from the recording by triming the sample (i.e. no time stretching), and set the project tempo to match the length of the sample, so it loops. I have found a way of doing this (trim the sample in an external editor, then drop it into a new project, and live automatically sets the project tempo to match the sample), but I am sure there is a simpler way of doing this within Live. The problem I am having is that as soon as I engage loop on the sample, Live appears to treat it relative to the current project tempo, which is not what I am trying to do.

Any help would be much appreciated, as I've been really struggling with this.

[yur2die4]

Anytime you have a clip set to 'Loop' it also has to have "Warp" on, there are no ifs ands or buts about it. Any time "Warp" is on, Live warps the clip.. The least amount of warping is done if say, you only have one warp marker on the clip. You can then either copy the tempo of that marker and paste it into the Master tempo, Or in Arrangement view you can turn on the "Slave" button, and Ableton Live's tempo is automatically adjusted according to whatever is set on that clip. If there are multiple markers, there might be a super fine increment of time inbetween temp adjustments of Live's master (I've experienced this problem when using Vinyl mode anyway.)

Back on topic, you can either edit the properties of the clip to set the start and end spots on the loop, or you can highlight the part you want looped, and right click for (I'm not positive but i think it is) "consolidate" Which will re-render the clip into its own piece.

I'm not sure which warp mode would produce the least artifacts when it comes to using 'Slave'. I'd go with Beats, but most experienced people would probably point you towards Vinyl or Complex 2.