A Free Utility for Those That DJ With Live

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
drush
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Post by drush » Tue May 27, 2008 11:00 pm

one of my least favorite things about ~djing with Live is keeping tracks organized. and is why i really like traktor now that it does 4 decks.. the database.

oblique strategies
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Post by oblique strategies » Tue May 27, 2008 11:33 pm

drush wrote:one of my least favorite things about ~djing with Live is keeping tracks organized. and is why i really like traktor now that it does 4 decks.. the database.
Any serious (or minor) downsides to Traktor?

jtxx000
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Post by jtxx000 » Wed May 28, 2008 1:41 am

nbinder wrote:Could you provide some information about how you read the asd files? I would be very interested to read the information from the asd file, too....
I have no idea how the file is structured, so my loading method is pretty hacky. I search for the string "WarpMarker" in the asd file. The first match is related to the file structure or something, because it's not actually a warp marker. Every match for "WarpMarker" after the first, however, is.

These warp markers contain a beat number and the position in milliseconds in the audio file. To find the tempo, I just read the beat number and position for the first two warp markers and used that to find the tempo. There's an extra warp marker in the file that's not shown in Live to enable the calculation of the tempo for the last warp marker.

If anyone from Ableton is reading this, mucking around in hex editors is no fun--proper documentation for your file formats would be awesome!

nbinder
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Post by nbinder » Wed May 28, 2008 7:48 am

Oh okay... thank you anyway... I was looking for a way to get the warp markers... hm.

jtxx000
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Post by jtxx000 » Wed May 28, 2008 8:32 pm

Yes, that's not too difficult. I can post the code if you want.

jimbalaya
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Post by jimbalaya » Wed May 28, 2008 9:08 pm

Posting the code would be great!
Thanks for taking your time to write & post this!

drush
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Post by drush » Wed May 28, 2008 9:17 pm

oblique strategies wrote:
drush wrote:one of my least favorite things about ~djing with Live is keeping tracks organized. and is why i really like traktor now that it does 4 decks.. the database.
Any serious (or minor) downsides to Traktor?
no not really. the world of efx you can use is smaller, but so what. the efx in traktor are good... if you need more than that i don't know what to tell you ;-)

on the fly looping is a lot easier in traktor.. it's built with djing in mind (duh) so looping is simple and seamless.

midi integration is good.. you can control whatever you want.. you can effectively tear stuff apart in real time.

can't really think of much else. as long as you aren't trying to do a more serious live PA, like with lots of little tiny clips, it was purpose-built for djing. and finally works really well for that.

ironically the one failing it *might* have, in the traktor manual they say that if you can't get a beatgrid to cooperate with a really stubborn file (i.e. it won't warp nicely, in Live-speak) they actually recommend taking the file into Live, warping it, and then bringing it back into traktor. not sure how this works with markers and whatnot because i've really not had any problems getting stuff to match up in traktor.. but it's in the manual.

and i rarely found myself playing more than 4 files at once in Live, so...

a searchable, visible, extensible track database for djing is SO nice.

jtxx000
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Post by jtxx000 » Thu May 29, 2008 3:45 am

Here you go: http://www.annoware.com/downloads/Tempo ... r/Main.cpp

I've documented the relevant bits. If you want to compile, you'll need JUCE: http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce/

oblique strategies
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Post by oblique strategies » Thu May 29, 2008 4:25 am

drush wrote:
oblique strategies wrote:
drush wrote:one of my least favorite things about ~djing with Live is keeping tracks organized. and is why i really like traktor now that it does 4 decks.. the database.
Any serious (or minor) downsides to Traktor?
no not really. the world of efx you can use is smaller, but so what. the efx in traktor are good... if you need more than that i don't know what to tell you ;-)

on the fly looping is a lot easier in traktor.. it's built with djing in mind (duh) so looping is simple and seamless.

midi integration is good.. you can control whatever you want.. you can effectively tear stuff apart in real time.

can't really think of much else. as long as you aren't trying to do a more serious live PA, like with lots of little tiny clips, it was purpose-built for djing. and finally works really well for that.

ironically the one failing it *might* have, in the traktor manual they say that if you can't get a beatgrid to cooperate with a really stubborn file (i.e. it won't warp nicely, in Live-speak) they actually recommend taking the file into Live, warping it, and then bringing it back into traktor. not sure how this works with markers and whatnot because i've really not had any problems getting stuff to match up in traktor.. but it's in the manual.

and i rarely found myself playing more than 4 files at once in Live, so...

a searchable, visible, extensible track database for djing is SO nice.

Thanks for the info drush.

I use Live for so many different things, including DJing. But I've been hearing for a while now that some of the other DJ apps were better suited for basic DJ work. I'll have to check it out one of these days.

BTW: are you on Mac, PC, or both? Any computer-related issues like crashing, etc.?

drush
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Post by drush » Thu May 29, 2008 7:06 am

2.2ghz MBP. never a performance issue ever. live or traktor.

oblique strategies
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Post by oblique strategies » Thu May 29, 2008 10:27 am

drush wrote:2.2ghz MBP. never a performance issue ever. live or traktor.
Good to hear! Thanks

jimbalaya
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Post by jimbalaya » Thu May 29, 2008 11:35 am

Great! Thanks for posting the source...
One thing that I've noticed is that it doesn't load all files into the app, so it can't rename all of them. Some of the files that it wasn't able to load were already manually renamed (doing some testing), and as far as I remember they weren't overly atmospheric tracks or anything.
I guess sometimes (format/regularity of warp markers?) it just can't figure it out...

jtxx000
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Post by jtxx000 » Thu May 29, 2008 3:01 pm

If the warp markers are automatically generated then Live won't save them in the asd file. Try messing with a warp marker and live and then hitting the clip's save button.

GUY SMILEY
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Post by GUY SMILEY » Thu May 29, 2008 7:06 pm

thanks, nice post. will be useful to me.

sandman
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very handy app

Post by sandman » Fri Aug 01, 2008 4:57 pm

nice job man,i like this app good for djing but one thing i dont understand about this app is, it cant read all the tempo's live provide or i'm i doing something wrong? cuz if i add the files to it,It renames some of the files but not all i unno why. i'm i doing some thing wrong? works great but not fully help me out if u can homie, like this app :D

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