Most significant unresolved Ableton feature - Song Tabs for live use

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neokruncher
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Most significant unresolved Ableton feature - Song Tabs for live use

Post by neokruncher » Tue Oct 29, 2024 4:09 pm

Anyone who uses Ableton in a live setting will quickly find the complexity increases exponentially as each new song is added. Session View becomes a swamp of hundreds of clips scrolling off the screen. Arrangement View has a time line running perpetually off the screen.

Adding a spreadsheet like ability to have separate tabs for each song/section would be a massive help.

Ideas
- generate new tab from scratch
- select scenes and right click to "add to new/existing tab"
- use locators in arrangement view to have song branch to material in another tab or enable Clyphx to do it
- import a live set into a new tab

A basic implementation would be simply a GUI tweak whereas branching timelines etc would obviously require a little more thought.

S4racen
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Re: Most significant unresolved Ableton feature - Song Tabs for live use

Post by S4racen » Wed Oct 30, 2024 9:09 am

This is the concept behind KB Live Solutions SONG:MODE, each scene is named to bring it into a specific song, and then the mode is switched into on the Push Controller whereby the top rows buttons light to give you the choice of songs.

When a song is selected, the bottom buttons each represent a single scene, it's like chunking up a level of session mode and is very intuitive...

https://isotonikstudios.com/product/songmode/

Doesn't address your suggestion of UI in Live itself but it's certainly an effective solution to streamlining a performance.

Cheers
D

Angstrom
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Re: Most significant unresolved Ableton feature - Song Tabs for live use

Post by Angstrom » Thu Oct 31, 2024 12:24 am

neokruncher wrote:
Tue Oct 29, 2024 4:09 pm
Adding a spreadsheet like ability to have separate tabs for each song/section would be a massive help.
In the past I've used the analogy of Adobe AfterEffects, or Premiere . In those apps they use slightly varying terminology but you can create or load parallel projects into the project panel, and also embed them into each other. In AfterEffects they are called Compositions, and placing one inside another is called nesting.

Now, while this may seem unrelated to your wish, it's actually key. Because the basis is to have an overall encapsulating Project, which can contain many Compositions. All the compositions can play at the same time, or sequentially, and elements can be used from one in another (to create transitions, or variations). So this creation of a "parent" (project) to the "children" (songs) gives many opportunities for things like live performance in a more freeform way (loading songs without stopping) - but also many other avenues.

I actually mentioned this to Gerhard in person a billion years ago, and he explained that there was some resistance because the Ableton team felt that the users were already confused by the relationship between Session and Arrangement. The team thought that users would be ultra-confused by the nested approach creating a very weird non-hierarchic self-referencing project structure. I mentioned that Adobe users seemed to be fine with it but I was not persuasive enough, as evidenced by the versions since then (2007). I suspect Latency calculation and compensation concerns were also a huge reason that a variation of this idea has not surfaced

agustinvolpe
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Re: Most significant unresolved Ableton feature - Song Tabs for live use

Post by agustinvolpe » Sun Nov 10, 2024 1:48 pm

AbleSet has already solved that, and beyond.
Thank me later.
https://ableset.app/

Angstrom
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Re: Most significant unresolved Ableton feature - Song Tabs for live use

Post by Angstrom » Tue Nov 12, 2024 10:41 pm

agustinvolpe wrote:
Sun Nov 10, 2024 1:48 pm
AbleSet has already solved that, and beyond.
Thank me later.
https://ableset.app/
ucchhh, I'm sorry but that's not the same thing at all.
And I try not to be prejudiced against people who play live sets from arrangement, but it is a big struggle for me, lets put it like that. I mean. DJing is closer to live performance than that.

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