Ableton Forum

It might actually be ideal for that kind of thing - then you can build things remotely and drag stems in to Live, Logic, or desktop to arrange. Tim Exile also put together a Reaktor patch 'mix tape' for basic arrangements of riffs from your fave jams.

It's very Session view like with it's real time non-linear jammy goodness for getting ideas out, so also takes no time to get the hang of for an Abe old timer like you, it's still early enough to be closer to the original 'audio clips only' Live without too many other things complicating it yet. Although the public beta with hosting is 'any day now' I believe. I (and probably most seem to by the looks) use Ableton along side it, to record the things in you described, or from sounds/vsts etc. Although that's changing a lot now they are hosting plugins.

But interesting what you described happening there, I had something similar going on, but with the kinds of quirky set ups I've been playing around with it's been hard to nail down the cause. In my case, I was using AUM on my iPad, plugged into my Macbook air (7 years old now, so could rule out your M1 probs as cause) using IDAM, then as an input in Live.

The weirdest latency I had happening was at first I started using a return track routed to the Audio In (or sidechain in) of the track Endlesss was on, so that I could have a bunch of different tracks of loops, synths etc. and then just use the sends to record them into Esss. I started to notice what I recorded would be out of sync, often by quite a lot — but the kicker is, only when I used the sends — if I routed something directly to the audio in, or sidechain in then it would stop it. I thought that really shouldn't be happening, but I guess it could point to a PDC problem only related to sends/returns, especially as Esss is still fairly new and small, so maybe flies under the radar more (there's some weird stuff going on with Reason sequencers in the VSTs plugin in the alpha which the Esss team have been aware of for a while and don't haven't fixed yet — also a sync type problem, that only happens when Esss is running, not just the 'run' buttons in Reason)

But I haven't reported it as there's more, so I still don't know what to put at Ableton's feet. More to the point, like you time reporting after troubleshooting can start to get hard to justify next to other more pressing things, and I spent a LOT of time just trying different workarounds, and never found a conclusive cause I could narrow it down to. Add to that my son is 20 now and moved out and fleeced me of most of my gear, so on top of these in-the-box things, I've also been left mostly with this stupidly annoying Roland Go Mixer which only has a "monitor" out, which I later found out (bewilderingly) means mixing program signal with input, apparently expecting the on board iOS audio out to be the output, so combined with the Apple dick move with the headphones and single port (now having dongles for both lightning AND USB C between my iOptions) then having to have a hub arrangement almost as big as my phone or drain the battery, there's been a lot of pissing around. IOW — on top of the IDAM + send issue, I then had analogue in recording as another variable, and I'm pretty sure I still had some of the latency, it gets hard to remember amongst the melee.

Link complicates matters and as an alternative to hosting as VST in Live I've also used them standalone, piped via either Soundflower (still surprisingly reliable after all this time unsupported) or Ground control, or more recently Black Hole. I've kept all 3 installed to variously trouble shoot, and for the most part neither alone seem to be guilty of anything. I'm not sure if Link itself is causing any of the issues with Live, but in Reason I've had it occasionally lose its shit and start searching for tempos a dog might hear, or a seismograph.

And I've been using Link between the iPad + AUM, and either just Live + VST, or + Esss standalone too. The next complication is I've ALSO been getting a weird extreme latency in this setup that SEEMS to be related to AUM hosting sequenced apps like Drum computer and similar, up to half a bar. It sometimes seemed so close to almost be in sync that much out, so I spent a good while trying to work out if AUM had some kind of pre-roll quantised type thing when using Link, or something along those lines. But eventually I found out AUM recently added a time delay node for channels, and adjusting that (stupidly high) seems to deal with it best. And of course now I can use IAA in the alpha I'm not really doing any of these convoluted set ups to record my iPad apps, and probably won't again to look at it any further — unless it shows up with VST/AU directly somewhere.

Anyway, a lot of that was probably TL;DR for you, but it might show that something common to both of us is related to at least the delay, and I might flag this to both teams now I've typed all this unplanned, as your post made me wonder if there could be some kind of PDC reporting error between them, maybe even related to Reason to boot.

Ha! I just noticed an old 'typing into a form' habit of copy/pasting long amounts of text before hitting submit came back like falling off a bike from being burned by the old BB forums back when.

Forge. wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 01, 2022 7:25 am

Ha! I just noticed an old 'typing into a form' habit of copy/pasting long amounts of text before hitting submit came back like falling off a bike from being burned by the old BB forums back when.

Yeah, I definitely formed that habit right here

I’m not sure what to tell you regarding sync issues. My setup is really very basic and always has been. I’ve had to rely on any apps or changed that affect the clock, as far as I know. That’s what made my issue so frustrating… It’s basically a line in mic/guitar.

I never did figure it out entirely, but I think my issues might have something to do with the SSL channel strip and AU vs. VST3 and both of them vs. Rosetta. I deleted default Audio tracks and the default template and the issue went away. I opened a set I hadn’t worked on for a month or two though and the -27.2 drops on the Master track came back. The latency is gone though. I *think* the volume thing re-started when I added a MIDI track (which I had saved with an SSL channel strip on as default). I hadn’t deleted the default MIDI trackI saved previously, just template set and audio

I really wish there was an easier way to add the same plugin to multiple tracks in Live like you can in Logic. At the end of the day, saving default set/audio/MIDI is only something I’m doing cuz it’s such a PITA going one by one to add/remove the same plug after the arrangement is formed and extra tracks for ad-libs, samples, multiple takes, and such start increasing the track count. The pitfalls of channel strips.

Paddy shared that Session view preferences menu option that at least lets me delete plugs from Session view and has saved me immeasurable time during troubleshooting.

I’m bummed that I can’t depend on and suspect the SSL plugs. I noticed that running them as AU causes issues with labeling and if I move the tracks around the SSL UC1 controller won’t pick it up unless I use VST3. None of the SSL plugs are M1 Native yet so Rosetta gets involved. Thankfully, the UF8 control surface doesn’t need channel strips to kick ass and basically installs itself as keyboard in Mac OS. I’ve been loving it. I’m not gonna bother with the UC1 until the strip and bus compressor are native. I can’t keep remixing from square one, it’s a waste of time.

H20nly wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 18, 2022 7:16 pm

Paddy shared that Session view preferences menu option that at least lets me delete plugs from Session view and has saved me immeasurable time during troubleshooting.

which one is that?

And speaking of which, where the hell is that pink haired Kiwi? I sent him that 'glad to see you' message ages ago and he's disappeared again.

I just spent a few days working on a project I imported from Pro Tools of my son's band recorded in the Uni studios. Kind of a novelty to be using Live in that way, as it's always generally been a lot more for electronic music for me.

So as it happens these types of things you describe are fresh in my mind. I only started using PT doing my masters in the uni studios, and having spent so long ITB and electronic I made an explicit point of using it pretty much exclusively on projects recorded there to get to know it and really take advantage of the amazing library of mics and top-line world standard studio gear to record real instruments. I had a blast, just inviting in musicians and groups of all kinds and experimenting with the different mics/placements ... etc. Plus, I started on the Waves bandwagon 20 years ago when I got the Native Power Pack because that's what the little studio I worked in used, and over the years had gradually upgraded it to Horizon + a few extras, but I kind of stopped bothering to use them for the most part because I was happy with the Ableton plug-ins, so it was an excuse to make use of those thousands of $ worth idly gathering virtual dust.

But despite my little 7 YO MBA handling the sessions surprisingly well, I started getting some frustrating show-stopper crashes related to one or two plug-ins, probably exacerbated by the imposition of upgrades all round, not fully embraced because I didn't want to fork out for things like the Waves Update Plan etc.

After messing around a few times with workarounds like starting new sessions + import session data, and not always successfully trying to hold shift and stand on one leg while patting my head and whistling Dixie to load sessions without plug-ins, I actually stopped and thought y'know what, I kind of hate the workflow in PT anyway, and decided to import it all into Live.

Workflow-wise I was immediately glad I did, but there were a few annoying things that got in the way. Firstly, now that Ableton has bitten the bullet and added comping it's opened up the possibility of importing these kinds of projects, so it would be really good if there could be a way of importing PT playlists to the take lanes. But even just being able to drag in a 10 track multi-mic drum session easily so that the names & order are preserved would be a great start, as you kind of have to do it one by one at the moment, which really means it just makes more sense to comp in PT and bounce stems, which defeats half the point if it's for Live's workflow.

Another thing I found myself wanting to do is be able to have return tracks that could go inside group tracks, like PT AUX tracks, so you can have e.g. specific FX/Reverb/Dly etc just for drums where the drums are without having to go and show all the returns then find the relevant ones, as the number of returns can become sizeable in that kind of project. You can do some kind of workaround with audio fx racks, but it would be much nicer and simpler to just decouple a return and add it to the group and use existing send knobs.

Saying that, the convenience of being able to save an audio fx rack definitely helps in the kind of scenario you described. But you could just drag a group track to the browser and use it as a default and achieve the same thing.

And I agree with you about the plugins on multiple-tracks thing, that's something I came up against a lot. I guess it's not really a huge hassle to have a ready made group track to drag in from the browser, and if you've already done a bit first drag the audio clips to the newly dragged in tracks. But it definitely would feel more aligned with industry standards if you could maybe hold CMD or OPT when dragging a plugin to a bunch of selected tracks.

In PT I find myself doing things like that a lot. And the PT groups help a lot when working with multi-mic sessions. But Live does have 'link tracks', and TBH I haven't fully tried to see how many things it applies to. I'd assume it would only affect clip related things, and not mixer/solo etc. And again, Live does that if multiple tracks are selected, so that's not a big deal, but in PT it's another one of those Key Command habit things to enable or disable groups so that if you're doing an edit on 10 drum tracks you can quickly enable the group for solo etc.

And I have to admit I've really never properly taken advantage of default options. I think one of the cool things about Live is that I can load it up just with the original default and it's not usually many steps to get to whatever it is I'm wanting to do. Likewise, after all these years of confusion or frustration with things like "Audio 001.wav", and even going on about it to people I teach, I still usually forget to name tracks before doing a lot of things. It's a lot harder to get away with it in these kinds of larger PT type sessions though. And Ableton has improved the auto-renaming in ways that help a lot.

Unfortunately either the same bug causing the PT crashes seemed to follow the session, I think maybe related to Kontakt or Reason Rack, or both, and I had to do a lot of the same kinds of new session & drag tracks in type workarounds, eventually even using an empty session just with the relevant MIDI + Reason Rack tracks to freeze/bounce some stems.

And actually it was a good thing, because it forced me to be more decisive, and made me realise it's actually a better workflow, at least in a session like that, to commit to stems, and especially bounce sub-mixes of group tracks.

E.g. there are LOADS of backing vocals, and I even decided to just load all the various takes that are separate playlists in PT to their own audio tracks and play around with layering a lot of them together. I ended up with a few sub groups, like "high harmony", "falsetto" etc., then in a bigger sub group "BVs", so it's been a good way of going through each part, bouncing a sub-mix of each layered part, then a BV sub mix (the addition of nested group tracks is great BTW), and this has been a good workflow in general. Just going from PT into Live has functioned as a step in the mixing and quality control process that's given me an excuse to nail things down rather than allowing them to kind of linger in Live-Noodle-Land, as can be one of the cons of Live.

I've been playing around with channel strips too, and in this time of insane embarrassment of riches abundance there are so many ways of feline flaying, sometimes an audio FX rack of things like the Kramer HLS + Pie, or for SSL I can either do the same with the NI Solid series, or just use a single Reason rack with their version. For the most part I'm so impressed with Reason these days it seems like a preferred go-to, but the one thing I've always found with Reason is it doesn't always play nicely with others, so sometimes it can be less stable. But that's another argument for being decisive and committing/bouncing (usually I use Freeze, then drag the frozen clips to another audio track as the quickest way to bounce in place in Live), and as I said, I actually think that's a good thing.

Ultimately I've always been pretty sceptical about things like modelled channel strips, and I've usually found once I get into Live the workflow has a more significant effect on getting the sound I'm after more quickly. But for things like vocals and guitars I've finally gotten around to experimenting more and finding an appreciable difference. Especially things like the Kramer HLS/Pie, which have a clearly more noticeable character. And even the old classic LA2a and 1176 CLA models and PuigChild/Tech models are having their moment.

While I was working on the project over several days I had some Youtube playlists of Waves and other videos of the old legends like Pensado, Puig, Rubin, Vig and others on rotation in the background for inspiration, and it was well worthwhile. A lot of the time it was just gratifying to see how often they'd approach things much the same as I do, but I got a lot of ideas along the way too. One of the really interesting things was how often they still use old plugins like the Waves Renaissance EQ/Comp/Channel strip, and RVerb as their go-to, which I have too, and they are the oldest ones I have had for literally 20 years.

That's another thing I've been noticing recently too actually, as one of those 'holy shit, what happened to the last decade?' mind-fucks, is realising a lot of tools I still kind of feel are pretty new are actually 10+ years old. I look at some of the producer videos and it says "9 years old". Even just these big producers making videos kind of feels recent to me, because having made the first Ableton videos for Groove 3, when at the time they only had Kenny Goia doing Pro-Tools, when the other big names started getting into making videos I was very aware of it, because it felt like it was a sign of the way the industry was going. So it spun me out to realise a lot of that happened over a decade ago.

Long TL;DR story short, I actually think all of these are good things. We're at the point now where we don't even have to think about the tools, we can literally put on a blindfold and point in any direction, and whatever you put your hands on is better than anything I could have dreamed of when I started. Even Garageband for free. So it's total freedom to just be creative and not get distracted by GAS.

Oh yeah, I meant to say I think last time when you said something about how few tracks you had in your sessions that it's easy to forget that now one track is doing what used to require maybe multiple tracks & combinations of gear, and in fact that's more a sign of maturity and experience, where you only use what you need for what you're trying to do, and are experienced enough to know what will do the job without wasting time searching. The down side of all this for young people getting into it is they have so many options it makes it that bit harder to know where to leave it the hell alone.

Well I just did a Forge classic and wrote about 80% more than I planned.

H20nly wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 18, 2022 7:16 pm

Forge. wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 01, 2022 7:25 am

Ha! I just noticed an old 'typing into a form' habit of copy/pasting long amounts of text before hitting submit came back like falling off a bike from being burned by the old BB forums back when.

Yeah, I definitely formed that habit right here

Just to emphasise the point, I just got this



And I took a screenshot because this^

which then took it even further and reminded me how easy we have it these days when i had to find an image host then actually manually paste the link and further demean myself by having to add the BBCode tags.

To add insult to injury, in my lazy hesitation to spend so much of my time on such a frivolous triviality I just put "IMG" into Google, and it took until page 4 before I had to give in an add "hosting", and even then it was less than straight forward, and I discovered TinyPic has folded.

There's just no place in this brave new world for us old fogeys with our BBCode.

To this day I still often sign an opinionated post with [/my2c] in an anachronistic attempt at once media literate tech savvy wit, akin to the more contemporary, if even itself long in the tooth hashtag meme, as in #STFU-Forge-you-already-went-way-past-TL;DR

Even better, the first time after writing all that it was just the broken link icon, and I was tempted to just leave it there

damn bro

I have lots of responses… but later…

Forge. wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 20, 2022 6:34 am

H20nly wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 18, 2022 7:16 pm

Paddy shared that Session view preferences menu option that at least lets me delete plugs from Session view and has saved me immeasurable time during troubleshooting.

which one is that?

He shares with me here, 3rd post
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=245032