looping audio clips vs looper?

[slatepipe]

hi - what would you consider to be better in terms of utilizing memory more efficiently, or are both methods the same?

when i play live i record and loop a lot of midi clips which works fine but in the past i have sometimes recorded live audio into a clip on an audio track and looped that but noticed that sometimes i would get an 'out of memory' error which would crash the set.

i've never really used the looper device and was wondering if this would be a more efficient way of recording and looping audio? what's anyone's views on this or are the two methods both the same?

i probably need a new laptop with more RAM anyway

[doghouse]

The real big difference with looper is you can overdub and clear the loop.

[slatepipe]

ah ok, so it doesn't really offer anything more efficient in terms of memory? ultimately i'm maybe going to have upgrade my laptop as if i try and record more than 1 clip and set it looping then it likely crashes

[TomKern]

when i play live i record and loop a lot of midi clips which works fine but in the past i have sometimes recorded live audio into a clip on an audio track and looped that but noticed that sometimes i would get an 'out of memory' error which would crash the set.

How big was that clip at the time of the crash?

I could be wrong, but I vaguely remember some podcasters complaining that they can not record audio in Live that is longer than 2h (I think) because of some file format issues.
(files bigger than 4Gb I think)

[slatepipe]

it wasnt very long at all. it would just have been me playing a few notes on my bass then quantizing and looping them. no more than 5 or 6 seconds

[TomKern]

yeah then this can't be it. But at that length it should not have any bearing on memory at all.
So that error message is weird.

[yur2die4]

Looper has overdub which in itself has a lot of distinct qualities. For Looper you either play stop record delete, you can't switch between alternate parts without having two loopers (or a long recording on a single looper)

Looper treats audio as a tape recorder or record, or essentially it is like 'repitch' warp mode. If you change tempo, looper will change key. Live looping clips may or may not change key depending on which warp mode is your default for recorded material.

[Electric Blue Studios]

ah ok, so it doesn't really offer anything more efficient in terms of memory? ultimately i'm maybe going to have upgrade my laptop as if i try and record more than 1 clip and set it looping then it likely crashes

On my system I find looper to be more taxing than clip recording.

[slatepipe]

well i might have a try with it (looper) to see how it fares in comparison with recording into clips. i guess the crashing thing may be to do with the amount of other samples i have layered up in instrument racks on other tracks - there's about 100 samples in the set in all, all varying from about 1-10 seconds, waiting to be triggered with my bass. it'd be nice to record more audio as part of the set though, either from my voice or the raw bass audio

cheers

[doghouse]

Playing back audio doesn't tax the CPU much at all, but if you are using a lot of effects on your tracks that will eat up CPU.

[jestermgee]

Playing back audio doesn't tax the CPU much at all, but if you are using a lot of effects on your tracks that will eat up CPU.

Also consider warping as an "effect" since it will add load, especially complex pro on larger samples.

[slatepipe]

i've tried to streamline the whole set as much as possible. i have about 10 tracks with instrument racks on them, some of them duplicate tracks of the same rack, each rack has a bank of about 20 samples on, all of them cropped so i'm just playing the cropped sample, not the original longer recording. there's hardly any effects on the tracks, if any. i just use three sends - conv reverb, delay and voxengo distortion. then another five tracks with synths on - organ, bass, operator, harmonium, emm knagalis, one or two of them may have the odd delay on but not much

i think it's something to do with maybe i got too many of the samples loaded into RAM. my laptop works ok but is pretty old now. only 4 or 6 gb of RAM


i posted the last time we played with the set on the link your music page : viewtopic.php?f=9&t=226155


it's my birthday soon anyway, i'm going to try blag a new laptop