Please Bring Back playback head scrubbing!

Chris J · Post by **Chris J** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 10:33 pm

I'm joining in, although I didn't use the playback head for a scrubbing effect I thought the way the set a start point was quick and effective in previous versions and I'm so unhappy with the new way to set a start point.
I say unhappy but it's rather that i don't understand how to work easily and efficiently with the new system.
changing the global quantize say to 1/16 to change the start point and setting the clip quantize to one bar is a way around for lauching clips on the 1, but scenes are of course affected by the global quantize, so it's not pratical if you play with scenes
Plus I can't make sense on how to duplicate a scene without having to reset the start points manually to get an identical scene.
the usefull "insert scene" isn't so usefull anymore with all the editing that has to be done to get a result identical to what previous versions used to do.
I'm just hoping I've missed something, I've posted about that in the bug section, and seeing that there's no comment, I realize it's not a buggy behaviour, just a bad design.

Machinate · Post by **Machinate** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 11:12 pm

Chris J wrote: changing the global quantize say to 1/16 to change the start point and setting the clip quantize to one bar is a way around for lauching clips on the 1, but scenes are of course affected by the global quantize, so it's not pratical if you play with scenes

This is only a problem if you input bpm values in the scene name. Otherwise all the clips will still be retriggered at their local quantization.

Chris J wrote: Plus I can't make sense on how to duplicate a scene without having to reset the start points manually to get an identical scene.

that's what the Keep button is for.

Chris J wrote:I realize it's not a buggy behaviour, just a bad design

That depends on who you listen to - I like it

telekom · Post by **telekom** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 11:14 pm

Angstrom wrote:it's interesting to me, because it indicates they didn't know that people were using playhead scrubbing

just think about the implications of that.

Yeah Angstrom, it's worse than that - people have simply been taking it for granted because it is so integral to the program and so useful... maybe no-one ever mentions it because it's a bit like saying "I like oxygen, always makes my lungs feel good..." and as a result Ableton maybe doesn't even think we noticed it. That is quite funny and weird... lol

Chris J · Post by **Chris J** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 11:33 pm

Machinate wrote:
Chris J wrote: changing the global quantize say to 1/16 to change the start point and setting the clip quantize to one bar is a way around for lauching clips on the 1, but scenes are of course affected by the global quantize, so it's not pratical if you play with scenes
This is only a problem if you input bpm values in the scene name. Otherwise all the clips will still be retriggered at their local quantization.

Cool. I hadn't noticed , some of my clips were on global, thx machinate.

Machinate wrote:
Chris J wrote: Plus I can't make sense on how to duplicate a scene without having to reset the start points manually to get an identical scene.
that's what the Keep button is for.

Doing that on 20 tracks or more everytime I want to duplicate or insert a scene is not as practical as just duplicating a scene in previous versions, is it ?

Machinate wrote:
Chris J wrote:I realize it's not a buggy behaviour, just a bad design
That depends on who you listen to - I like it

obviously you understand it better than me, or maybe we have different uses, this is just not doing it for me right now. maybe once I understand it. It's just that until now live was great for stupid people like me, now I have to think before doing simple things, it feels like the program is controling me.

leisuremuffin · Post by **leisuremuffin** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 2:36 am

i guess i just feel like this is a lot of whining over something that isn't such a big deal.

if it is to y'all cats then im sorry.

-lm

quandry · Post by **quandry** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 2:46 am

everyone uses Live differently. I'm still using 3 because I use the scrubbing on over half of my songs that I perform live, so for both performances and practicing, 5 is worthless to me because it doesn't scrub the way 3 does (or 4 with the ctrl key). ymmv, but for me, it seems a bit extreme for Ableton to drastically alter a key feature that was touted at length in their manuals as a major selling point of the application. Do you have a special feature or effect in Live that you use virtually every song? If it were taken away in a newer version of Live, wouldn't you be a bit pissed about it? I'm sure we can all imagine some sort of scenario like this, sadly mine is a reality, and I feel the need to speak up and let Ableton know that though the new features are nice, taking away old core features that many of us depend on for performances (like effect presets being located with the effect, duh) pretty much sucks, and makes the new version totally worthless for performance. Might not matter to you, but it does to me, and I bet Ableton probably wants to know about changes that might drastically reduce the number of upgrades.

Ryan

hoffman2k · Post by **hoffman2k** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 8:15 am

quandry wrote:everyone uses Live differently. I'm still using 3 because I use the scrubbing on over half of my songs that I perform live, so for both performances and practicing, 5 is worthless to me because it doesn't scrub the way 3 does (or 4 with the ctrl key). ymmv, but for me, it seems a bit extreme for Ableton to drastically alter a key feature that was touted at length in their manuals as a major selling point of the application. Do you have a special feature or effect in Live that you use virtually every song? If it were taken away in a newer version of Live, wouldn't you be a bit pissed about it? I'm sure we can all imagine some sort of scenario like this, sadly mine is a reality, and I feel the need to speak up and let Ableton know that though the new features are nice, taking away old core features that many of us depend on for performances (like effect presets being located with the effect, duh) pretty much sucks, and makes the new version totally worthless for performance. Might not matter to you, but it does to me, and I bet Ableton probably wants to know about changes that might drastically reduce the number of upgrades.

Ryan

`
So Live 5 is worthless huh?
Why not just scrub in Live 3?

Chris J · Post by **Chris J** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 9:16 am

leisuremuffin wrote:i guess i just feel like this is a lot of whining over something that isn't such a big deal.

if it is to y'all cats then im sorry.

-lm

interesting to read your comment after i've just said you have to manually reset all tracks prior to duplicating/inserting/pasting.
If you work with 2 tracks per scene I understand you're happy, but if you use many tracks, it is a big deal.
Did you even try duplicating before making such a comment ?

quandry · Post by **quandry** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 1:10 pm

hoffman2k wrote: `
So Live 5 is worthless huh?
Why not just scrub in Live 3?

Wow, very insightful

That's exactly what i'm going to do, and I'll save $119 at it. If you'd bother to read more of the thread, you'd see that I love a lot of the new features and effects and resizable tracks etc. in 5, but since they drastically changed scrubbing, and moved the preset/patches to a very inconvienient location, I'll stick with 3, which I've already said I would multiple times (is there an echo in here?). Do you perform live in front of audiences with Live on a weekly basis, recording loops on the fly using 14 tracks and over 50 effects? If you did, then the new preset scenario in 5 and global quantize being linked to clip scrubbing would totally mess up your flow, and not be very useful on stage. Seing as it is supposed to be a "live" program, and they changed features to make it more cumbersome and circuitous to do simple things like change effect patches, I'd say compared to 3 as a live performance tool/instrument, 5 loses out in my book. Anyway, thanks for the understanding and sympathy

krikor · Post by **krikor** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 1:24 pm

quandry wrote:
hoffman2k wrote: `
So Live 5 is worthless huh?
Why not just scrub in Live 3?
Wow, very insightful That's exactly what i'm going to do, and I'll save $119 at it. If you'd bother to read more of the thread, you'd see that I love a lot of the new features and effects and resizable tracks etc. in 5, but since they drastically changed scrubbing, and moved the preset/patches to a very inconvienient location, I'll stick with 3, which I've already said I would multiple times (is there an echo in here?). Anyway, thanks for the understanding and sympathy

Personnaly, i think i will for the moment stick to live4, as i mostly use it in live situation, even though i'm starting to build my own thing in max, some new features are cool for the producing side of live, which i also use, but overall this new loop/nudge and menu thing is not good for me, too tricky for one and also too slow for the other, plus i don't use a mouse while on stage, so the right clik menu is unfortunately of no great help in that situation...

supster · Post by **supster** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:12 pm

Chris J wrote:Did you even try duplicating before making such a comment ?

leisuremuffin is one of our resident rabblerousers. ignore him

.

astar · Post by **astar** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:40 pm

Like I said before, they are SO close with the nudge feature and control of play position via midi but it's true, they've missed out on a few key things for useful scrubbing.

They HAVE to fix this global quantize thing because having it linked to global quantize renders any clips that are also linked to global quantize useless!

The way I figure tho, everything that could be done with scrubbing could technically be done with control of the play position via MIDI if they had setup the quantization correctly.

There is a decent work around that I've found...If you setup a bunch of buttons on your midi controller to send a different value onto the midi cc mapped to play position you can get very close to the scrubbing effect.. For example... send value 8 on a midi cc which is mapped to clip play position and it will move the playposition to bar 2, beat 1 of a 4 bar loop. Doing it this way with global quantization set to 1/16, 1/32 or NONE gives a decent scrubbing effect.

You could potentially have 128 buttons that would each move the play position to a section of the clip. This would be even more cool if you could somehow convert NOTE Values to CC values in LIVE 5 because then you could potentially have each key on a keyboard moving the play position to different sections of the clip instantaneously or at a rate that the global quantize is set to. (I've tried doing this with a midi effect but I get latency)

I did find a problem tho... it seems that the cc values for play position don't seem to map quite evenly in live 5 when quantization is at 1/32 or NONE (I posted a bug report about this in the beta forum)

Would also be good to have 2 quantize values for scrubbing the play position with a rotary knob.. One for step distance and one for when the play position actually moves there

cheers!

leisuremuffin · Post by **leisuremuffin** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:49 pm

supster wrote:
Chris J wrote:Did you even try duplicating before making such a comment ?
leisuremuffin is one of our resident rabblerousers. ignore him
.

Wow, sorry if i have a different opinion than you. Y'know what? I've used the playback head scrub feature before, and in fact its something that i use in class when demonstrating the crossfader. (i copy a clip to another track and change the playback possition while x-fadeing btwn the two. lots of fun.) Now i can do this with a midi controller! Great! was the old way better? i dunno, maybe... But im sure with time you'll find a way to use the new way. Was this the most important feature of live and a big f%cking deal? no. sorry it's not.

-lm

hoffman2k · Post by **hoffman2k** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:59 pm

quandry wrote:
hoffman2k wrote: `
So Live 5 is worthless huh?
Why not just scrub in Live 3?
Wow, very insightful That's exactly what i'm going to do, and I'll save $119 at it. If you'd bother to read more of the thread, you'd see that I love a lot of the new features and effects and resizable tracks etc. in 5, but since they drastically changed scrubbing, and moved the preset/patches to a very inconvienient location, I'll stick with 3, which I've already said I would multiple times (is there an echo in here?). Do you perform live in front of audiences with Live on a weekly basis, recording loops on the fly using 14 tracks and over 50 effects? If you did, then the new preset scenario in 5 and global quantize being linked to clip scrubbing would totally mess up your flow, and not be very useful on stage. Seing as it is supposed to be a "live" program, and they changed features to make it more cumbersome and circuitous to do simple things like change effect patches, I'd say compared to 3 as a live performance tool/instrument, 5 loses out in my book. Anyway, thanks for the understanding and sympathy

You'll probably get back the scrubbing thing. From what i understood. I thought you used it as a production method.

And actually. i dont mind the new preset handeling. I like it.
Now it's possible to make folders. A lifesaver if you have over 1000 operator presets you want to sort.
You can even preview the presets. Or have a whole set of clips ready to load with that preset.

zanlyons · Post by **zanlyons** » Wed Jul 13, 2005 7:22 pm

I thought this was just a bug in the beta. what on earth are they doing.
This is one of the reasons most people I know use live.
Bring it back please and with midi control functionality as well!