While I love Ableton's features and the sheer number of plugins that I can get with a DAW that supports VST, I've had a problem that I've been grappling with since day one regarding artifacts.
I think most of you who've used Soundcloud are familiar with their transcoding. I originally thought it was just their transcoding but even bumping exported songs down to 320 kbps mp3 on a reasonable encoder I could still hear artifacting coming up.
Right now I have a short experimental tune that I made that has a few different lead synths that are giving me trouble. I imported the loops from Reason 4, all at 44.1khz 16bit, and made 8 bar loops 9 or 10 bars to deal with trail-off and where I needed to stagger certain sounds back and forth to include the tails I did. The trouble is, I'm getting a sound on one of these pads - in Ableton, before I even export, that sounds like a bass drum or top bouncing upward; its a phantom sound that comes from nowhere. I've tried stripping all effects from the song, I've tried high quality and turning off both the loop and warp functions - nothing changes.
I was wondering if any of you have had to work through issues like this and for those of you who've been able resolve these kinds of phantom sounds - what exactly is it? Is it a phasing issue? Is it the preferences of Ableton's architecture being violated? While I admit that sounds such as this are subtle and I've had other producers agree, you still hate to go through putting all kinds of work into a mix to hear it chomp, grunt, or start making other strange noises that you can't remove.
Ableton and internal artifacting?
Re: Ableton and internal artifacting?
I have had random sounds occur which are not buffer related or anything like that. I don't think there is any kind of dithering issue going on ither becuse for me the sounds 'which are very rare' seem to be fixed to a point in the projects time line. last one was on little pop on a bass line from operator. It would happen on the one bar and wouldn't happen every time but when it did it was just in that sport. it was a duplicated clip which was in other areas of the project aslo with no problem. I tried copying other matching clips over it and made sure there was no unruly automation at that point and it was the only sound effected.
I ended up re sampling on of the good clips and pasting the audio at that point in the track to get round it. Very odd. As for sound clouds online encoder its not the only one which can be pants. the beatport and junodownload players seem to introduce big lumpy artefacts to. for sound cloud I try uploading tracks I've masted to - 5 DB or there about to see if it was a headroom issue. I think this may help but haven't really carried out many tests but I can see that sound cloud also normalises the audio as part of the encode. Whether it does the pre or post the compression may have a great effect on the resulting quality. I don't think the DAW used should really effect this to greatly unless you are rendering out at a very truncated bit rate/depth. And anyway Ableton 8 does an OK job at these conversions http://src.infinitewave.ca/ certainly should be throwing of an encoder.
I ended up re sampling on of the good clips and pasting the audio at that point in the track to get round it. Very odd. As for sound clouds online encoder its not the only one which can be pants. the beatport and junodownload players seem to introduce big lumpy artefacts to. for sound cloud I try uploading tracks I've masted to - 5 DB or there about to see if it was a headroom issue. I think this may help but haven't really carried out many tests but I can see that sound cloud also normalises the audio as part of the encode. Whether it does the pre or post the compression may have a great effect on the resulting quality. I don't think the DAW used should really effect this to greatly unless you are rendering out at a very truncated bit rate/depth. And anyway Ableton 8 does an OK job at these conversions http://src.infinitewave.ca/ certainly should be throwing of an encoder.
'WE ARE BLIP' EP out now. Juno Beatport and so on. Distant tremor Unearthed VA CD http://distanttremor.com/
http://soundcloud.com/distant-tremor/se ... -are-blip/
http://www.myspace.com/alanpsyfi https://www.facebook.com/pages/Psyfi/107738257120
http://soundcloud.com/distant-tremor/se ... -are-blip/
http://www.myspace.com/alanpsyfi https://www.facebook.com/pages/Psyfi/107738257120
Re: Ableton and internal artifacting?
"a sound that comes from nowhere" this seems like aliasing to me.
If you listen to this chunk of audio in another application does it exhibit aliasing anyway?
If the clip's HiQ is active, Ableton kills off aliasing pretty damn well. In fact in the tests that were circulating around a year or so ago - it did it better than most other DAWs.
Remember - HQ in preferences is not an app-wide option which toggles quality, it is a PREFERENCE on what will happen to imported clips. What that means is : if HiQ is set in preferences - the next clips you load will be set to HiQ, but existing clips will be left alone. They will not change.
So - if you want a particular existing clip to be HiQ, select it and press HiQ.
If, in your case, the clip is set as HiQ, and you are hearing aliasing - I suggest checking the original wave itself in a wave editor.
If you listen to this chunk of audio in another application does it exhibit aliasing anyway?
If the clip's HiQ is active, Ableton kills off aliasing pretty damn well. In fact in the tests that were circulating around a year or so ago - it did it better than most other DAWs.
Remember - HQ in preferences is not an app-wide option which toggles quality, it is a PREFERENCE on what will happen to imported clips. What that means is : if HiQ is set in preferences - the next clips you load will be set to HiQ, but existing clips will be left alone. They will not change.
So - if you want a particular existing clip to be HiQ, select it and press HiQ.
If, in your case, the clip is set as HiQ, and you are hearing aliasing - I suggest checking the original wave itself in a wave editor.
Re: Ableton and internal artifacting?
psyfi, what you're telling me sounds identical - for me also its in two fixed spots and seems resilient to anything I try to fix it.
The funny thing I've noticed about Soundcloud is that it seems to have less to do about the max dB that you master to and more to do with how much you compress, a good master bus limiter seems to take me a long way as well. I had a fair amount of luck in that respect by taking sounds that may have been a bit spread or thin and doing some really long tail deep-knee compression to sort of compact the audio. Before that even I had a much worse problem - quantize error - where I found out that you just can't mix bit depths or sample rates in a project without some pretty ugly results.psyfi wrote: As for sound clouds online encoder its not the only one which can be pants. the beatport and junodownload players seem to introduce big lumpy artefacts to. for sound cloud I try uploading tracks I've masted to - 5 DB or there about to see if it was a headroom issue. I think this may help but haven't really carried out many tests but I can see that sound cloud also normalises the audio as part of the encode. Whether it does the pre or post the compression may have a great effect on the resulting quality. I don't think the DAW used should really effect this to greatly unless you are rendering out at a very truncated bit rate/depth. And anyway Ableton 8 does an OK job at these conversions http://src.infinitewave.ca/ certainly should be throwing of an encoder.
Oversampling filters aren't even working on this, neither ES Antialias at 8x nor Fab Pro L at 4x on post (which I have on my master bus). I try to find areas where either that sound has something strange happening in the low or high spectrum, no luck.Angstrom wrote:"a sound that comes from nowhere" this seems like aliasing to me.
If you listen to this chunk of audio in another application does it exhibit aliasing anyway?
Believe it or not that's having little or no effect either. I'm not making a tune out of 0dB'd distortion either, the track content is pretty clean.Angstrom wrote:Remember - HQ in preferences is not an app-wide option which toggles quality, it is a PREFERENCE on what will happen to imported clips. What that means is : if HiQ is set in preferences - the next clips you load will be set to HiQ, but existing clips will be left alone. They will not change.
Seems like my last option is taking a good three minutes (the entire song arrangement for that sound) and import it whole to see if that absorbs any of the problem. After that I may have to deep-knee compress it and try some other things to see if another part of the song may even be kicking up an odd audio dynamic here or there behind it.Angstrom wrote:If, in your case, the clip is set as HiQ, and you are hearing aliasing - I suggest checking the original wave itself in a wave editor.
Re: Ableton and internal artifacting?
Wow, I was able to find the problem and it was something that was never even brought up. I tried exporting the song with different tracks knocked out and was able to isolate the problem being a high bass line I had against a chime/bell pad that had a telephone like oscillation that would reach down into the 400hz range at times.
The craziest part was this - it wasn't frequency clashing, it wasn't phase or any of that. All of these sounds I had exported from Reason 4 and since I knew that I needed a tail fade I exported all of my 8 bar loops at either 9 or 10 bars to make sure I got the full trail of every instrument. For some reason Ableton just wasn't handling the bass loop well. It was fading okay at some points but would do odd things at others and the best I can figure is that the fades were lasting longer than 1 bar and consequently when the fade passed the end of the audio it sprung the bass line up making sort of a *boung* type bounce. What I still don't fully understand is why this only happened some of the time and not always; oh well, solving the problem will be good enough for now.
I guess this just goes to show, if you have strange aberrations in your mix try checking what you have on loop before you start taking unneeded compression, EQing, or start trying to lower the ceiling for more headroom.
Problem Solved
The craziest part was this - it wasn't frequency clashing, it wasn't phase or any of that. All of these sounds I had exported from Reason 4 and since I knew that I needed a tail fade I exported all of my 8 bar loops at either 9 or 10 bars to make sure I got the full trail of every instrument. For some reason Ableton just wasn't handling the bass loop well. It was fading okay at some points but would do odd things at others and the best I can figure is that the fades were lasting longer than 1 bar and consequently when the fade passed the end of the audio it sprung the bass line up making sort of a *boung* type bounce. What I still don't fully understand is why this only happened some of the time and not always; oh well, solving the problem will be good enough for now.
I guess this just goes to show, if you have strange aberrations in your mix try checking what you have on loop before you start taking unneeded compression, EQing, or start trying to lower the ceiling for more headroom.
Problem Solved