bad ableton sound rumour - just caught myself :-)

[3phase]

btw. "brown henke dither " is a joke i once made concerning dithering algorithms. but understanding jokes is a highly complex matter, i assume....

yep, of course this word is a joke and I think all people know it here . but I guess it has become a winged word for a invisible sound degeneration no one is able to show here so far.

true.. hard to reproduce but experienced by many.. all retards and lunatics of cause...

The sound degeneration on the single tracks is easy to explain..Thats when the SR conversion is allways on..even when you have tried to avoid that.. cant say when it happens..but it defently likes to happen on imported files.. possibly it happens when you try to change the speed and return to the original speed for test purposes.. that the program is loosing its transparent state than..
And its very likely that this is not a consitsant phenomen because sometimes it happens..other days its ok... allways when it matters its not ok... but that can be karma.. the karma selectiv ableton bugs.

Than we have the mix bus phenomen... mixing a handfull of tracks in live and another daw results in an more open and 3dimensional sound in the other daw.. while some people might argue that the more glued together sound of ableton live is even better the reality is that more separation and detail is what we see as the better sound quality.
There are various tricks to glue the sounds together..but you cant get more separation into a glued mix in again.

also this phenomen seems to come and go... maybe it has something to do with the insertion and removing of plug ins in the sum... or running another daw in the background..because on the ab tests on the same computer with logic it seems to pretty consistant to be there..
Or its just related to unintended SR conversion on the source tracks...

its not so easy to hear allways that it has kicked in or not.. on a saw wave syntheziser recording it might be impossible to spot while on a complete and masterd mix it just sounds shit as soon the SR kicks in.. Anyway astonishing how seemless ableton managed to switch SR conversions on and off..while running..tempo changes..as soon the correct tempo is hit hundreds of clips switch to a transparent operation again...

quite fascinating that you dont hear a click or glitch on such a stunt... in general there is very little clicking within live.. one wonders where all that smoothing gets applied...

Atually we deal with elastic audio here..can elastic audio be as precise than the stiff sample clocked audio of the other daw´s? comes the rubber with a price? According to ableton not..what would be fine.. if just these damn haluzinations wouldnt come along and make you question those statements again and again...


The last type of BHD i came along and maybe the easiest to reproduce.. DIgital insertion of a jünger hardware digital limiter via external fx plug.. biased listening? hard to exclude after so many bad experiances..or maybe logic is dithering its outputs to 24 bit and therefor such an digital 24 bit processor and 24 bit D/A conversion in general sounds better with logic than with live?

Whatever the reasons are .. The bad ableton sound rumor is not about to stop aslong all the lunatics and retards come along such phenomens.

i just asked around in personal surrounding the last week..the belive that there is something going wrong with the sound when using ableton live is around 100% here.. but ok.. just asked the 8 producers i had on the phone lately.. just.. not a single one of them thought that everything is fine..and they all own and use live.. but just on stage...

maybe we should do a poll? on gearsluts?

[ovorigin]

+1

While I dont have a full understanding of what exactly live is doing to the sound, when the same tracks are put into Logic the difference is VERY noticeable.

The same with live input, Logic gives a bigger clearer sound, not a very technical description but when demonstrated to just about anyone it is immediately apparent.

As a daw Live is in about last place and if it werent for its main trick of prioritizing audio playback over everything else and clip view/general lay out for live use then I wouldnt be bothering with it.

It hogs so much cpu that my fully loaded 2.4 core 2 cant monitor/playback a vocal and a gtr track with a handful of waves plugins in each with about 6 other track with no effects (just playing clips) with out some crackling or clicks occurring even if the cpu meter says %30. Which while im on the subject means %60 in activity monitor WTF? AND doesnt seem to be running in 64 bit mode or using more than one cpu according to activity monitor, maybe Im doing something wrong, maybe I didnt instal it properly, maybe my hardware is to old and maybe I dont care anymore about the list of excuses that make up this piece of software?

The Looper :/ At the risk of breaking into an angry rant, I bought Ableton 8 for its looper and integration within live mostly, and over a year later I still cant trust it to not do something weird at the worst moment. No individual control of each loop even though the most basic loopers have this feature. Multiply emails each way over a year later and I still have a $500 live performance tool I dont trust.

I CERTAINLY could go on but will just end by saying that ableton were the first with a good idea and dont have any competition in the Live music creation department so they can serve us shit and we will eat it.

The day Logic or someone else comes up with a comparable live solution I will say goodbye to the 'less than pro' app that is ironically called ableton 'live'.

maybe they should be calling it unableto live ? ? ?

Everything is just bloat ware to sell the next update, while Ubuntu os is 700 meg I hear, I want to be ableTOO run my music as a single task system like my microwave where nothing crashes nothing glitches, I press a button once it does the same thing EVERY TIME.

The fact ableton havent seen the stability benefits of such a move being worth their effort is yet another testament that money is the driving force now a days, not that its a bad thing, but if it no longer pushes them into new levels of music/software integration then they have lost focus somewhere.

[nowtime]

+1

The Looper :/ At the risk of breaking into an angry rant, I bought Ableton 8 for its looper and integration within live mostly, and over a year later I still cant trust it to not do something weird at the worst moment. No individual control of each loop even though the most basic loopers have this feature. Multiply emails each way over a year later and I still have a $500 live performance tool I dont trust.

When I quit trying to use the multi-function button on the looper and just used the individual play/rec/ovdb/stop buttons, Looper became very dependable.

[ovorigin]

But they ARE a company, and money IS their goal - that's business, good or bad.

and we wouldnt have ableton at all to bitch about if it werent that way so thats fine but they have wasted far to much resources on trying to make ableton a daw which most agree they failed at when they could have put that energy into making it indestructible live.

FIRST AND FOREMOST DO NOT PASS GO ! ! ! INDESTRUCTIBLE ! ! !

then worry about the other stuff.

Id like to see ableton for linux or the ability to install parts of live to somehow run a leaner less cpu hungry and RELIABLE music station instead of 'oh my computer cant run it anymore, time for ANOTHER upgrade' mentality.

Many forget how powerful a core 2 is compared to just a few years before them and I made music just fine with a lot of plugins and it sounded awesome. Ok that was a daw wich didnt have the live abilities of ableton but come on, no one can tell me that we need to go from a 266 mghz G3 to faster than a core2 2.4 ghz to get a 'live' music tool.

but it sells hardware and it sell software so why bother

[Evengy]

im a ableton live 8 user and dont know previous versions of live. since which version is the sound a problem?
threads like this are the reason for a bad reputation and i begin to believe it myself and i hate you for that guys. but if its real, it should be fixed. if the problem exists since live 1 i don´t think that they will do anything with the sound engine.

i use fl studio as a 2nd daw and the first thought when i started live 8 the first time was "sounds thin". but it was a problem myself because of settings like fades, warp etc. 2nd thing was that the simpler has a default -12 db setting. fl studio´s default setting in master channel is a limiter which give +3db gain and we know that louder seems to be thicker/fat.... so it was my fault.

yesterday i did another test with a zebra 2 track where i played a single note (preset). after the export i did it in live 8 too and there was a difference. i did it more than 3 times because of settings like dithering but the sound was different everytime between live and fl studio. i used .wav export with 24bit / 92 khz (maybe 88 or something but it was the same in both daw´s). ableton live sound was a bit thinner in the overall sound and more crips in the highs. fl studio´s sound was thicker and because of that i think a little bit warmer.

i will do the test again today. i really can´t believe that o_O and more important -> i don´t want to believe that. i wanna use ONE daw in the future because there is so much to learn and learning two daws bother me in my evolution as a musician

[mr.ergonomics]

Evengy, there are no known or reproducible problems with the sound quality in ableton, there are certain things which could work better in live, but there is nothing why a simple sound in ableton sound worse than in another daw. but I agree, there are many rumours out there and many people (myself also) are a bit irritated. I suggest to read the first post from this thread again.

btw. fl also has a very bad sound quality rumour since a long time on it and even logics summing was a target some years ago. now it's abletons time.

[Evengy]

thanks for your fast reply. yeah thats irritating me alot ;/ i can live with the fact that there are things which could be better... thats normal... that was my thought too, why should a single file sound so different in ableton live.

there is too much rumour about every daw. i think the people are angry that they don´t produce a nr. 1 hit in the first days

[spektralisk]

In the end if your track sounds good to you, all this shit does not matter. I think that with Live you can write great sounding tracks just like with other daws and live workflow wins with others on that field for me. So I wouldn't bother with these little problems that for ours who like to complain are big. Just don't waste your time, f**k this thread and go write some music. People made outstanding work years ago and were more limited with their options regarding daws. Thank you.

[Forge.]

Live really doesn't sound as "good" as other DAWs. It's hard to explain if you've never heard it, but it doesn't quite have the same sheen. And of course it sounds the same with single audio clips or plugins - if it didn't then we'd REALLY have a problem. Now, like (I think) 3phase suggested before, try a full mix (8+ tracks) with the same plugins, same audio clips (maybe use only audio clips, in case whatever the "other" daw uses for a sampler colors the sound?), with all warping and fades in Live turned off. This may be hard to do exactly, but it will sound different.

.

first of all, watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ

and then tell us again.

Something "extra" I got from that video was where the guy was using Sonar for the examples, and it looked to me like their level meter started to go into the red a -3dB - if this is true and I didn't just imagine it, then Live's meter doesn't behave in the same way, meaning people could well mix differently - there are loads of psychological elements to this game - food for thought anyway

remember, quite often louder appears to sound better when it is just louder, and likewise if you are making all the levels higher because Live's meter makes you think you can, you might make bad mix decisions or drive certain plugins harder

read our man Tarektih's write ups about mixing too while you're at it - if you follow his directions and mix as low as he suggests you will feel in Live like you have stupid amounts of headroom, while in Sonar it wouldn't feel the same because the meter goes red sooner if I was right about that, but I guarantee if you follow those instructions you will be able to get a killer mix just from Live...... .anyway, that's just an example of how a different layout could affect the sound without actually *affecting the sound*, such as by encouraging you to mix in a different way.

but for me the long and the short of it is I've been a musician for over 20 years and an audio engineer for a good chunk of that and I think Live sounds fine so I use it.

Anyone getting their knickers in a twist that much about audio that is highly likely to end up as compressed MP3 or listened to on iPods or in Cars or clubs are just really looking for distractions to justify not writing any music! we've all been there!

or put another way, you can get great sounding mixes out of Live if you know what you are doing, so just make some music!!

The placebo effect

[Evengy]

i did a new test a few mins ago. i opened live and created a midi track with dcam strobe and a 4 bar pad. i exported it as a .wav file with 24bit and 96khz then 24bit 88khz and 24 bit 44,1khz. they all sound differentbut thats normal. then i did the same in fl studio with and exported it 3 times as well. all 6 sounds are different... one has a bit more bass another one is a bit thinner, one is more resonating etc...

i compared then 24bit 96khz from fl studio vs live and the two other samples too. yes, live sounds different...wait... or sounds fl studio different? or cubase? or logic? wtf? wow i can get perfect sound from both daw´s! my result now is that there is no better or worse. the thing is that i must mix every sound in its individual way to get the result which i want and thats possible with all daw´s. guys.... my disbeliefs are gone and i healed myself! im off now to make some music instead of wasting my lifetime try it yourself!

[mr.ergonomics]

wait, I think there is an easy explanation for that. afaik dcam synth are not static, that mean that you will get a different results everytime like with an analog synth. the same counts for reverbs and phasers etc.

[Evengy]

wait, I think there is an easy explanation for that. afaik dcam synth are not static, that mean that you will get a different results everytime like with an analog synth. the same counts for reverbs and phasers etc.

hehe ok i failed thx for the information! i did it again with sylenth1 and deactivated the internal effects. i don´t checked the knobs exactly but it sounds like the same. there are minimal differences and i mean REALLY minimal. maybe the pad preset wasn´t static again.... the size and the waveform is different but from the quality itself... no there aren´t any differences. the size of the exported live file is ~7 kb lower. ah i forgot...without touching any faders the exported file from live is ~2 db louder.

im healed anyway =:) i will never have second thoughts again in live!

[Jstz]

Abletons sound quality issue is due to the whole WARP engine thing. Just by having the Warp on your doing all kind of Serious process to whatever signal its on. Just think about all the different things WARP is doing, usually all these things are best done with dedicated algorithms in software designed for these specific tasks. Ableton does a bunch of things and also has a single tool (WARP) that does all these 'Delicate' things (pitch-speed-conversion)....... I doubt the algorithms are that great. So by using WARP your creating tiny bits of Artifacts (mud) that all add up to 1 big artifact =Dullness. Its common sense to anyone that gets it.

[pencilrocket]

I agree. I'm a bit surprised when I watched the youtube video by Berklee College of Music, in which they are showing using WARP in recording moment rather than record it again.

[jasper]

You really don't hear a difference between all the daw's ?