Live's audio engine..?

[natasha]

Just wondering if anyone can link me to info on why and how Ableton's audio engine is so powerful. Why its useful etc

I mean i know in a short amount of words but i need some good technical detail. Ive searched this site, and the reviwes have helped.

Im doing an assignment for college on the devlopment for Ableton so info would be appreciated very much.

Thanks (and hello everyone as im a newbie)

[MrYellow]

Little hamsters run around on little wheels, the wheels are attached to
those piano roll music box things. Then depending on a 24bit binary
number switches are turned on and off... This controls which notes on the
music box are being muted and which are left to ring. The combination of
these notes can produce a large variety of pitches, timbres and textures.

The hamsters never get hungry as sub-sonic vibrations fool their
stomachs into thinking there is food in them. Occasionally one will expire,
but they are easy to change for anyone with some limited experience in
electronics and animal husbandry.

Some have found they can get more efficiency and raw processing power
from their hamsters by adding an external heat source such as a fish tank
heater.

It's also important to keep the water level in the drippers right, too much
water and the hamsters will spend way too much time drinking. Too little
water and they will stop running.

Some have also found that certain additives in the water can help hamster
efficiency. Though this may reduce your overall hamster live expectancy.

In conclusion, it is this radically different approach to audio processing by
using natural sound generated by many separate “music boxes” coupled
with the biological efficiency of hamster power that allows Live to produce
such great sound while maintaining a high level of flexibility.

-Ben

[supster]

Little hamsters run around on little wheels, the wheels are attached to
those piano roll music box things. Then depending on a 24bit binary
number switches are turned on and off... This controls which notes on the
music box are being muted and which are left to ring. The combination of
these notes can produce a large variety of pitches, timbres and textures.

The hamsters never get hungry as sub-sonic vibrations fool their
stomachs into thinking there is food in them. Occasionally one will expire,
but they are easy to change for anyone with some limited experience in
electronics and animal husbandry.

Some had found they can get more efficiency and raw processing power
from their hamsters by adding an external heat source such as a fish tank
heater.

It's also important to keep the water level in the drippers right, too much water and the hamsters will spend way too much time drinking. Too little water and they will stop running.

Some have also found that certain additives in the water can help hamster
efficiency. Though this may reduce your overall hamster live expectancy.

In conclusion, it is this radically different approach to audio processing by
using natural sound generated by many separate “music boxes” coupled
with the biological efficiency of hamster power that allows Live to produce
such great sound while maintaining a high level of flexibility.

-Ben

a smartass answer, but actually really funny!
./

[Chris Cowie]

Im not sure if your serious or your Mr yellow?? If you are then Ive just made an arse of myself havent i

If your serious I think it would have been nice if someone tried to explain Live a little for you.

Just wondering if anyone can link me to info on why and how Ableton's audio engine is so powerful. Why its useful etc

I mean i know in a short amount of words but i need some good technical detail. Ive searched this site, and the reviwes have helped.

Im doing an assignment for college on the devlopment for Ableton so info would be appreciated very much.

Thanks (and hello everyone as im a newbie)

Ableton is useful for many things including Studio work, Dj Work, and live performance. I use Ableton in the studio and when I dj. I used to use live alone for Dj work but have now gone back to vinyl and use Live alongside turntables. It can be used alone as a DJ tool and many do this very thing.


Its main attributes I suppose?

Instant warping of audio which will take a file and basically shift it in time for you, or out of time if you prefer!.

User Friendly and encourages the user to make music fast.

Arranging your tracks on the fly using the Clip view is another very string point. This mean you launch clips in real time while recording your arrangement.

It can also be used as a traditional Linear style daw so you can record your geetar band if you like.


All in all its a very cool tool.

regarding the powerful audio engine. I would be best to let someone more technical savvy than me explain. In saying that Im not sure if the audio engine is any more powerful than other Daw? In fact Live is a good bit more CPU hungry than any other daw I have which is probably due to the warping....then again come to think of it I dont warp much audio and I dont notice any difference with CPu usage. Maybe someone would chip in on this one?

not sure why you got such a great reply mr yellow...hehe. Maybe he thinks your not serious? If your not then Ive made a bit of an arse of myself havent I

Cheers
Chris

[MrYellow]

nah was just a mood I was in.....

Audio engine......

That would be the confidential, proprietary information on the systems design?

Yeah think like Chris went into.... Much better off focusing on the stuff that
makes live special.... Interface.... The audio engine is a black box... The
coders know what's in there....

If you want general information on how audio processing works then search
around a bit for code for wave editors, VST effects and stuff.

Generally from what I've seen there is a loop that takes incoming samples,
processes them and passes them on to the output. So a floating-point
value comes in, a floating-point value goes out. Which represents the
waveform.

-Ben

[Chris Cowie]

Glad I havent made an arse of myself then.



And like I thought your more tech savvy than I am. Cool



OH, and the mice on wheels is something I will try tonight.

[MrYellow]

http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/course ... 2003/lil2/



-Ben

[nebulae]

One of the biggest advantages of Live is the gapless audio engine. There is not other sequencer that comes close to it in terms of having spectacular audio without any hiccups. The cost it a higher CPU and a caching system that usually requires more powerful machines to do the same kind of track-count or virtual instrument usage as Cubase or Sonar.

However, the trade-off is a clear winner in workflow and creativity. Although you can talk about techincal achievement with the gapless audio engine, there is also a less tangible benchmark of what you can get done with the tool. I think your college project ought to have this as an important topic - what can you actually get done, and how quickly can you generate lots of great ideas? Live is fantastic at coming up with ideas you didn't know you had.

On the other hand, the gapless audio engine is keeping Live from providing true PDC, and that can cause issues with production. Even to the point of not being able to get the new Virus TI, which requires buffering and delay compensation for the VSTi integration of the hardware synth.

I think I'm digressing, so I'll stop.

But one more point - as far as the internal engine is concerned, it's not hamsters at all. It's the power of cow farts. That's right. The Abletons employ a groupd of 14 people who constantly go to nearby farms with big, airtight bags to harness cow farts. Then, back at Ableton central, they put all the farts into this machine that looks a lot like the engine of the Enterprise (a lot like when Spock had to go in there to fix it, or else Khan would have been able to destroy the Enterprise). And while on that note, you have to be careful of the cow farts, because you could end up looking like Spock - all radiated and shit. Even if you are a Vulcan. So Kudos to the Abletons on their cow fart handling.

Now, once you've got the cow farts in the machine, you have to process the up quark and down quark of the protons in the fart. An illustration is here:

As you can see, the "warping" of the up quark and down quark is what gives Live it's phenomenal power. Hence the scientific term, "warp". Not too different from how dilithium crystals are used in the Enterprise. That and some bullshit about the space-time continium.

- Neb

[Chris Cowie]

http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/course ... 2003/lil2/



-Ben

So you were for real then.

good to know our furry little friends are more than just cute.

PS
Neb, thats just not technical enough. You forgot to mention the kryptonite

[nebulae]

http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/course ... 2003/lil2/



-Ben

So you were for real then.

good to know our furry little friends are more than just cute.

Also good to know that those little furry friends can make excellent Asian sounding electronic music.

[Chris Cowie]

Im interested to see what Natasha has to say on all this. I really have to actually go and do some work now. been threatening all day to do it. All Ive done is trawl the net. One of those days I suppose.


Now wheres my hamster.......

[D K]

actually, the big secret is the hamsters are kept on a diet of hemp seeds...

[Harris.Andrew]

There's many things that differentiate Ableton from the more traditional DAWs. these differences into two categories - technical capabilities and design.

Tech stuff: Warping engine - Suddenly loops and clips of audio can be easily scaled, time- or pitch- wise, very quickly. Clip envelopes (which can be used as envelopes, psuedo-lfo's, or something inbetween) allow for further manipulation of audio clips. Compare and contrast with basic concepts in music theory; tempo, key, Italian words like stacatto, arpeggio, etc. etc.

Design stuff: Performance-oriented design - Gapless audio engine, easy MIDI control, etc. Also the one-window interface paradigm. Session view. Again there's strong correlation to basic musical concepts: song structure / arrangement, the difference between sequencing and playing a physical insturment.

And so on. You will have to analyze and aggregate information according to the themes of your paper I'd also check the artist interviews Ableton has on this website. You could cite Sasha as a source in an acadmic paper

[sweetjesus]

I think on a philosophical level, one could say that the nature of Ableton's audio engine is directly interwined with the creativity of the output material.

Having an engine which is flexible and gapless (as described in earlier posts) allows for artists to feel closer to the music in this linear world of stop/start computer techno jargon.

Ableton is the first software which really lets you feel like you are making music as opposed to controlling software... to me it does anyway...

It also carries over a lot of things which people love in the way you interact with electronic music hardware, so it becomes intuitive in relation to how you are creating music which is quite to the contrary of other music programs which may carry visual elements that resemble hardware (like the racks of synths in Reason, or the mixer in Pro Tools) but operate like software trying to be hardware.

If there is a way I could describe what it feels like to use Ableton Live after having used almost every major music software platform both software and hardware it would be to say that Live is hardware trying to act like software.

[natasha]

@ Mr Yellow - Seen that link many a time and the patronising story almost cracked a smile......

@ Nebulae - Superzowie just what ive always wanted a cowfart essay ... nice.

I understand the concept of Ableton Live and what it does regards to time stretching , pitch shifting and tempo etc it was just info on the audio engine i need to talk about slightly more in deapth as ive written lots on its features, advantages.

Thanks for your .... erm ... help. Il try and pick out the necessarys amongst the hamsters and methane.