Live audio quality?

leisuremuffin · Post by **leisuremuffin** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:48 pm

LOLZ!

Svetla · Post by **Svetla** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:49 pm

next time research a product before you buy, and test the demo.
what a douchebag you are

deva · Post by **deva** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:50 pm

Heinz Graaf wrote:bottom line: Im not the oly one who thinks abmeton sounds like... ableton

I have not heard anyone else claiming that abmeton sounds like ableton... you are the first

leisuremuffin · Post by **leisuremuffin** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:51 pm

most of that shit is not even true. hahahahahaahaa!

deva · Post by **deva** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:53 pm

personally, I could care less if all daws sound the same. they all sound far better than I need them to. anyone who cannot make good sounding music in ANY daw, it is their fault

steve-o · Post by **steve-o** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:54 pm

deva wrote:personally, I could care less if all daws sound the same. they all sound far better than I need them to. anyone who cannot make good sounding music in ANY daw, it is their fault

So true!!

smartass303 · Post by **smartass303** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:56 pm

Chill out dudes...
There are two reasonable complaints.
a) volume automation alters the sound as Robert stated before.
b) some vstees are almost unplayable (only the first 127 parameters for automation available)

BUT

there are beautiful Tracks composed and mixed completely in ableton, even the pro of the pros wont hear a difference.

SO

Lets wait for live 7 and see how the mentioned Bugs will do.

303

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:56 pm

Wow, I have one gig last night and look what you guys have been up to

Just some clarifications:

- My cancellation tests were between SX and Live, not Logic. However when I got Logic earlier this year, I reran the test for my own curiousity, and you guessed it, total cancellation.

- Sometimes when you try to do the phase test and it starts creeping back in halfway through the song, it's usually because the tempo of the file is not 100% the same as the song. As Robert mentioned, even though the tempo field shows that it goes to the tenths place, it's possible to set this much finer.

- When doing phase cancellation tests, you can't just listen, as sometimes you'll get a difference result that is too quiet or too high in the freq range to hear. I always use a bit meter to make sure that the files are 1 for 1 bit for bit identical.

- Robert, I too have been noticing the issue with the small tiny clips being left when you cut audio file in Live. Been trying to get a good reproducible test of it, but so far unable. It happens to both recorded and imported audio, warped and unwarped. I thought orginally it might be because the files were just a teeny bit longer based on minute tempo differences, but it doesn't seem that way. As soon as I can reproduce this 100%, I'll send you guys an alp.

Anyway, have fun arguing guys, I'm off to the beach

Heinz Graaf · Post by **Heinz Graaf** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:56 pm

Robert Henke and some other dudes, during the last few pages you are trying to imply it is the user, not the tool. So by saying that, you kind of admit there is womething wrong. lol

leisuremuffin · Post by **leisuremuffin** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:59 pm

Tarekith wrote: - Sometimes when you try to do the phase test and it starts creeping back in halfway through the song, it's usually because the tempo of the file is not 100% the same as the song. As Robert mentioned, even though the tempo field shows that it goes to the tenths place, it's possible to set this much finer.

yep. me too me too i want credit too! member? back a few pages ago? when the new guy posted his test file? member? and i showed how that worked. member?

.lm.

90's child · Post by **90's child** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 4:01 pm

Heinz Graaf wrote:Baelton sounds like Ableton
Ableton has a retarded MIDI implementaion
Ableton doesnt do surround
Ableton has a wack reverb
Ableton isnt copatible with Waves
isnt compatible with BFD !!
isnt compatible with most vsts afaik

How can you seriously say that Ableton is a good up to par DAW??? Seriously...

Ever tried live midi recording on low latency with loop on?? hick hick anyone? Live 5 aswell as live 6. On Macbook pro aswell as on pIV.

I think you need to watch the recent Future Music Magazine studio interview with Chris Lake. He builds a quality club track using just Ableton 6's dynamic tube, delay and reverb. The only third party plugs he uses are Voxengo's Marquis compressor, Waves extra bass, L2 Limiter and S1 stereo Spreader.

He said he'd been playing it out in the clubs for the last few months (burnt straight to CD) and its been one of the best tracks in his set in terms of crowd response.

steve-o · Post by **steve-o** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 4:04 pm

90's child wrote:
Heinz Graaf wrote:Baelton sounds like Ableton
Ableton has a retarded MIDI implementaion
Ableton doesnt do surround
Ableton has a wack reverb
Ableton isnt copatible with Waves
isnt compatible with BFD !!
isnt compatible with most vsts afaik

How can you seriously say that Ableton is a good up to par DAW??? Seriously...

Ever tried live midi recording on low latency with loop on?? hick hick anyone? Live 5 aswell as live 6. On Macbook pro aswell as on pIV.

I think you need to watch the recent Future Music Magazine studio interview with Chris Lake. He builds a quality club track using just Ableton 6's dynamic tube, delay and reverb. The only third party plugs he uses are Voxengo's Marquis compressor, Waves extra bass, L2 Limiter and S1 stereo Spreader.

He said he'd been playing it out in the clubs for the last few months (burnt straight to CD) and its been one of the best tracks in his set in terms of crowd response.

Exactly!

3phase · Post by **3phase** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 4:09 pm

Robert Henke wrote:
Because even with all these flaws I have more fun producing music with it than I could ever have with the other DAWs. And this is why we are selling te product.

I see this the same way...but you are denying the flaws.
This whole debate is a farce because it jumps direct in your ears when you check it with trained ears... That this dont applys to many people..ok
but abletons constantly ignoring the problem makes it difficult to belive in the system.

Robert Henke wrote: Part two of the story is sound. Sound has nothing to do at all with the above. Speakers from the 50s might certainly sound fantastic and might exactly provide the right kind of coloration needed to do the music one wants to do. But no one could seriously assume that they outperform the top range of monitors build in 2007 as far as dynamic range, linearity, THD etc goes.

please leave my speakers alone with polemiks they outperform most modern system with phase coherency over a freq range from 40-15K
thats good... perfect speaker choice to hear little qualitativ differences.

.

Robert Henke wrote: A subjective discussion about part one makes no sense. And if someone like the sound of a vintage tube compressor it is pointless to tell him that this device distorts.

my speakers tell me thats ableton that is producing distortion in the very high ferquencys... at least it sounds thicker there what is usually an atribute of distortion.

Robert Henke wrote:
As far as the company Ableton is concerned: yes we work on those things and we take all of you including 3phase serious as long as your arguments make sense and help improving the product.

As a non Ableton person I'd say: If my own mixes sound bad, they do so because I am not good enough. Blaming the tools is absurd, we have paradise in comparison to what Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons,... had available.

I wonder why no one respnoded to a small but important comment i made earlier in this tread. What makes mixing and producing in a 100% digital environment so hard is not the lack of quality, it is the lack of the sum of millions of little nonlinearities any analog environment provides. Thats why some people dedicated to sound still use analog outboard equipment. Nothing keeps you from doing the same. Route a signal into some obscure hardware, route it back into your DAW and you'll have a new, richer sound.

And: where can I listen to those incredibly good sounding productions of 2007 that outperform productions of <1997 and give any hint that new technology really changed anything significantly soundwise?

Robert

I use a whole bunch of vintage preamps to fatten things... i love transformer balanced systems and when ableton would be wise they would create a mixbus that is bigger than live.. i suggested that years ago allready... mixing in the analoge domain is no plain addition...
at least not an a real desk that trys to sound like air..

anyway.. i dont fell that things i say are taken serious..or if they are its kept privat with ableton ...

you cant deal with critic.. thats said to ableton.

and regarding proove..
i learned to trust my ears... thats proove enough for me...see this as subjektiv but all soundengeneers mix choices are subjektive and still..everything people with ears claimed in the past regarding digital audio
got prooved by the time and is common sense now...the technocrats learned to explain the phenomen and now they are allowed to belive it..
i well remember all this analoge versus digital diskussions in the 80´s..
However...
Ableton has found various little details as we have heard where mr henke dont belives that that matters but they get adressed anyway..
we will see what this brings...
as said before..no aditional proove necessary when the company itself is allready in action..just a bit elephant like... more improovememts after further findings at a later point...

Just one question...

have you read the rane article about improoving the audio quality of a digital processing chain by reducing the dynamic range where needed?
the articel is not on the web anymore but Rane brought out a book..
was pretty intersting because they showed that you acumulate rounding errors when every stage gets unrealistic high dynamic ranges...

anyway.. i am an analoge audio expert..not a digital one..you probably know everything that is to know about digital audio..
and still...
people keep talking about a dull sound..they even use the same terms even when they never read abaout each other before...

maybe there are some hidden problems

jukeboxgrad · Post by **jukeboxgrad** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 4:17 pm

forge wrote:I think the test is only really valid if you have a constant BPM that is rock solid

I think you're missing the point, and bringing up something that is basically a red herring. I fully realize that this old acoustic track most likely has an elastic tempo. But that's not relevant. The clip is just a signal. lm had claimed that under certain conditions (beats mode, and indicated clip tempo=project tempo) Live will do no warping. I proved that this is incorrect. This is not because Joni's clip (most likely) has an elastic tempo. I'm pretty sure it's because the clip tempo displayed by live (141.23) is slightly different than the clip tempo as actually evaluated internally by Live (which might be, for example, 141.23499, or 141.23001, or 141.22999, or 141.22500; all those numbers obviously round to the displayed clip tempo of 141.23).

I'm not motivated enough to create an example, but I'm pretty sure the same phenomenon could be demonstrated with a clip that consisted of nothing but an electronically-generated click (with a non-elastic tempo, in other words). But the clip would need a tempo that is not a relatively round number (like 141.23). I have a feeling that the devices we have readily available to us would not make it easy for us to create a click with a tempo of precisely, say, 141.23499 bpm. 141.23, yes. 141.23499, no.

In other words, Live isn't warping Joni because her tempo is elastic. Live is warping Joni because her tempo is not a round number.

most of the people bringing this up are not talking about a track that is solidly the same tempo throughout

As I said, I think this is a complete red herring. I think the issue is tempo that is not a round number, not tempo that is elastic. Two very different issues.

the Audio engine of Live alone WITHOUT WARPING is not inferior to other DAWs

I think this is a nice concise statement of the central point.

… normally it is with a warp marker, which straight away means it is warped

I think a lot of confusion creeps in because warping can effect the entire clip uniformly, or it can vary within the clip via the use of multiple warp markers. We call both these scenarios "warping," but they're somewhat distinct from each other.

Part of the significance of the Joni example is that it demonstrates that warping can happen even when warp markers are absent (except for the marker at 1.1.1). So the presence or absence of multiple warp markers doesn't really prove that warping is happening or not happening. (I'm pretty sure you could have a clip with lots of warp markers but no warping, if you inserted the markers but didn't shift them sideways. But then of course it was pointless to insert them, unless you had another motivation, like using them as position markers.)

So it's not exactly right to say that just because you have a bunch of warp markers, "straight away means it is warped."

what you have raised is the more central issue of "when does Live warp" which is far murkier and harder to quantify

Yes. I think the problem is that for most people most of the time, Live is doing some warping. Even when you think it's not.

if you have a track that is consistantly at 128 bpm then it probably wont be warped if the track is 128 bpm

I think that's basically true, as long as you're in beats mode (and as long as the clip tempo is really 128, and not 128.001). But complex mode seems to mess with the clip no matter what (and I found this out thanks to lm). Try this: record some noise into Live. Live indicates a clip tempo of 120.00 bpm, and a project tempo of 120.00 bpm. But if you turn on complex mode, a phase-cancellation test will show that Live is messing with the clip, even though it shouldn't.

TURN OFF WARP then try the phase test

Speaking of torture tests, here's another test that I think is slightly interesting. Load a clip. Turn off the "Warp" button (in the Sample area of the clip editor). Render the session to disk. Now load the saved clip into another track, and do a phase cancellation test. The clips are not the same (and this is evident right away, i.e., with a short clip). Uh-oh. Live seems to be doing something unwarranted to the signal even though warping is turned off.

I wonder if other DAWs can pass this test (I have a feeling they can't). I have a few, but I'm not motivated enough to do the test right now.

leisuremuffin · Post by **leisuremuffin** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 4:20 pm

leisuremuffin wrote:
jukeboxgrad wrote:Obviously I've never posted here before, but I've been reading this forum for a while and using Live for a while.

lm, thank you for your posts, which have taught me a lot. I think you've basically nailed it, in this thread and in the earlier thread
that you referenced. However, I do have one observation/quibble/correction. In the prior thread, you said this:

leisuremuffin wrote:having warp on will not make a difference until you change the tempo or use complex warp mode
You've made this point several times. I think it's mostly true, but not exactly true. I have found that even beats mode (which you have claimed is 'safe') can introduce phase-cancellation problems, if the clip is long enough.

I think this is easy to demonstrate. I used an mp3 of Joni Mitchell's "All I Want," from Blue. I set up a phase cancellation test, per your very helpful instructions. I started listening and got what you predicted: silence. But then I decided to keep listening, and the silence ended at about 1:46. I think this is exactly halfway into the clip, and I think that position is not an accident.

I think what's happening is that the indicated clip tempo (141.23 bpm), even though it matches the project tempo, is perhaps a little different than Live's precise internal idea of the clip tempo (which might be 141.23499, for example). So a tiny amount of warping is done, in the form of some altered data halfway into the clip. (This issue of bpm rounding is something you alluded to somewhere.)

My hunch is that complex mode distributes these alterations throughout the clip, so the effect is heard right away. I also think that in beats mode the effect won't be heard at all (i.e., the phase cancellation test will yield nothing but silence) if Live's precise idea of the clip tempo is closer to what's displayed. In other words, I think I would have heard nothing but silence, even to the very end of the clip, if Live's precise idea of the clip tempo was actually 141.23000. And maybe it would take a clip a hundred hours long to reveal the warping if Live's idea of the clip tempo was 141.23001, rather than 141.23499.

I think the bottom line is that if you want something closer to perfect, using beats mode (and setting project tempo to match clip tempo) is not a complete substitute for turning off warping entirely (and this is contrary to what you've stated). In other words, I think your statement ("having warp on will not make a difference until you change the tempo or use complex warp mode") can be considered reliable except for clips that are relatively long.

I have a strong hunch that Live is as pristine as any DAW, provided warping is off. But a lot of Live's magic is in the warping, and I think they warp as cleanly as anyone else. As you and others have pointed out, I think Live gets a bad rap because warping is so central to it, and Live tends to warp by default, and it can have an effect even when you don't expect it to (i.e., when the clip tempo seems to match the project tempo, whether in complex mode or beats mode).

A Live set demonstrating what I described can be found here (8.6mb). Apologies to Joni. Only legitimate owners of Blue should download this file.

Just load the set and launch the scene. You'll hear silence until about 1:46.

I'm using 5.2, but I'm going to guess that 6 works the same way.

Thanks so much for the post! I really appreciate that you took the time and effort to put that together.

Indeed, the problem demonstrated here is that lives master can only be displayed to the 10ths place. so really the clip tempo is not exactly 141.23.

easy to prove, try this:

change the orig tempo in the warped clip to 140. (in the clip view, change orig tempo)

now copy to the second track and turn warp off.

change master tempo to 140.

now it cancels all the way through the clip.

so, you see, this will never be an issue with stuff you record into live itself if you dont change the master tempo. with imported clips, it can be a problem, but i'll bet you couldn't hear that difference anyway.

thanks again for the post, and welcome to the joys of posting here.

best regards,

.lm.

ps, can somebody quote this so rikhy can read it. (tell him to go fuck himself too)

pps: also in the older post, i made a user error when first testing repitch. repitch is absolutely safe at orig tempo. As Robert has said, the warp is completely disabled when at exactly orig tempo. However, this is still not so for complex. I'm guessing cause it's a third party piece of software.... or something.

uhhhhhhm, hello? hi! remember?

.lm.