Really? APC20 accesses 125 scenes only?

[oddstep]

Are people using livesets like record bags... with every track they might dj put into a clipslot? I am impressed by the guy with 500 scene live set. For me, an hour long gig would be using somewhere between 40 and 50 scenes. To need 500 scenes I would have to play a really frenzied set with everything continuously changing or I would have to play for something like 8 hours. Either way I'd be totally fried.

[piotto]

yes oddstep, i understand what you're saying...

but down here (virgin islands), we have the most cosmopolitan crowd to please in terms of music preferences... reggae, dancehall, bachata, reggaeton, r&b, hip hop, salsa, merengue, soca, bouyon, zouk, kompa, plus occasionally some soulful house, 70ies and 80ies...

it's an awesome scenario and it takes diggin into many genres...

so yes, i'm using the liveset exactly like a record bag, as you properly described it!
(also due to the fact that ableton live "mp3 search" and "playlist" capabilities are very minimal...

so it's very useful to have such a flexible liveset with all of your tracks loaded up, just ready for any possibility...
simply scroll and play what you need!

that's why i'd like to know if some of you elaborated some quick scrolling!

with apc20, the problem is that even if i scroll quickly with the trackpad to a different area of the liveset, the 5x8 grid won't follow until i manually click hundreds of times the down (or up) button, until i reach the desired area of the livesession...
a real pain.

any hints?
THANKS!

[friend_kami]

Are people using livesets like record bags... with every track they might dj put into a clipslot? I am impressed by the guy with 500 scene live set. For me, an hour long gig would be using somewhere between 40 and 50 scenes. To need 500 scenes I would have to play a really frenzied set with everything continuously changing or I would have to play for something like 8 hours. Either way I'd be totally fried.

yeah uh, unlike some other people who presses play then fistpumps, we have people doing things like beat juggling and onthefly mashups.
for me, it is not uncommon to use up to 10 scenes for a song either.

consider that the grid on the apc can be used as a beatjuggling monome; there goes those scenes down the drain.
just because you use one scene per track and only press play then stand around like a douchebag doesn't neccessarily mean that everyone is doing their "live" gigs like that. some people actually play live, complete with scene juggling and whatnots. since live doesn't have a good way of manipulating loops either, that too requires alot of scenes. 125 scenes is nothing for a 1+ hour set.

[taoyoyo]

I've never really got into scenes as 'song-switchers' (seems a bit too easy for a live performance) but there is a way to trick the track limits if you put the tracks from each song in a group and only have the groups (read: songs) open that you need at any given time?

This was the way that I planned on doing it (and I'm pretty sure that I did a test to see if this would break the limit... the limit seems to be based on visual tracks, so tracks hidden in groups don't count).

[3phase]

what's wrong with scrolling?

verticaly nothing, or not much..horizontaly everything because it leads to total overview loss..
one of theese detail implememtations that seem to come from the acountants department and not from stage or studio practize..

but regarding 125 scenes..that is actually a lot or enough when you learn to consider that reloading on stage during your set is mandatory to achive stable operation..theese monster sets with hundrets of scenes and dozends of tracks provoke crashes..at least on L8.. and its hard to keep overview..

the extended loading times of live and that its unoperatabel up to the moment the waveform display is reaady is a problem here.. and of cause that you cant load while running as we can do with other daw´s that are mainly done for studio use but in this regard more stage ready than live..

[piotto]

3phase,
that is very interesting...
in fact, i'm experiencing longer and longer loading time (almost 900 songs loaded now...)

i don't understand about loading of smaller sessions. is it possible or are you teasing?


what do you anyway suggest to do?
thanks much!

[friend_kami]

what's wrong with scrolling?

verticaly nothing, or not much..horizontaly everything because it leads to total overview loss..
one of theese detail implememtations that seem to come from the acountants department and not from stage or studio practize..

but regarding 125 scenes..that is actually a lot or enough when you learn to consider that reloading on stage during your set is mandatory to achive stable operation..theese monster sets with hundrets of scenes and dozends of tracks provoke crashes..at least on L8.. and its hard to keep overview..

the extended loading times of live and that its unoperatabel up to the moment the waveform display is reaady is a problem here.. and of cause that you cant load while running as we can do with other daw´s that are mainly done for studio use but in this regard more stage ready than live..

for me it's not about having monster sets with thousands of songs, it's about having one song being compromised of 10 or 15 clips, for whatever reason; automatic followaction, with different warpsettings + start locators midimapped to a matrix, several scenes inside a setup that routes audio differently prehaps and so on and so forth. there are several reasons to have one song take up more then 10 scenes, especially when you consider that each channel adds even more reasons.

if you have 4 tracks of 4 different songs inside a mashup set and you want to mash these 4 songs you could easily use up to 15 scenes for that to launch different parts of each track; drops, hooks and so on. remember that not everyone is playing 4 by 4 standard club related music, so not every track is ofllowign the standard 16/32/64 bar configuration either. i usually pick out several parts of several songs in order to create something new from it, like you do when you do mashups, only taking it a bit further and mashing up several tracks, keys, tempo's and so on.

consider these 4 tracks again, lets say that all of them have 4 parts that you find interesting. thats 4^4 possible configurations right there. 4 tracks, 4 interesting parts. 4^4 possible configurations.

if you wanted to use all of those configurations you would have to use 256 scenes. ofcourse you won't but im pretty damn sure that you could easily use 8 of them. now you only have 248 scenes left (or 117 before scrolling occurs, then), while you have set up and played 5 minutes of music. 55 minutes later you have, then used 55*8 scenes, which is 440.

see?

[oddstep]

yeah uh, unlike some other people who presses play then fistpumps, we have people doing things like beat juggling and onthefly mashups.
for me, it is not uncommon to use up to 10 scenes for a song either.

consider that the grid on the apc can be used as a beatjuggling monome; there goes those scenes down the drain.
just because you use one scene per track and only press play then stand around like a douchebag doesn't neccessarily mean that everyone is doing their "live" gigs like that. some people actually play live, complete with scene juggling and whatnots. since live doesn't have a good way of manipulating loops either, that too requires alot of scenes. 125 scenes is nothing for a 1+ hour set.

That's not how it is for me at all. For a long time I was using a padkontrol to trigger (midi)clips.. so I had to make a live set that worked with groups of 4 scenes by 4 tracks.... to get enough variation into that setup I had to do loads of live modulation, velocity sensitive clip triggering and on the fly resampling, so it seems weird to get through so many scenes... I guess with beat juggling the clips are fairly static and the excitement comes from switching through stuff rather than twatting the controller data like me. Thanks for pointing that out. Unthanks for calling me a douchebag. I wasn't calling anyone out- I was asking how does someone use that many scenes.

I totally get why a dj playing a diverse crowd would need 100s of scenes or better browsing than Live offers.

[3phase]

3phase,
that is very interesting...
in fact, i'm experiencing longer and longer loading time (almost 900 songs loaded now...)

i don't understand about loading of smaller sessions. is it possible or are you teasing?


what do you anyway suggest to do?
thanks much!

for djing? using traktor instead of live will do the job perfectly..

[friend_kami]

yeah uh, unlike some other people who presses play then fistpumps, we have people doing things like beat juggling and onthefly mashups.
for me, it is not uncommon to use up to 10 scenes for a song either.

consider that the grid on the apc can be used as a beatjuggling monome; there goes those scenes down the drain.
just because you use one scene per track and only press play then stand around like a douchebag doesn't neccessarily mean that everyone is doing their "live" gigs like that. some people actually play live, complete with scene juggling and whatnots. since live doesn't have a good way of manipulating loops either, that too requires alot of scenes. 125 scenes is nothing for a 1+ hour set.

That's not how it is for me at all. For a long time I was using a padkontrol to trigger (midi)clips.. so I had to make a live set that worked with groups of 4 scenes by 4 tracks.... to get enough variation into that setup I had to do loads of live modulation, velocity sensitive clip triggering and on the fly resampling, so it seems weird to get through so many scenes... I guess with beat juggling the clips are fairly static and the excitement comes from switching through stuff rather than twatting the controller data like me. Thanks for pointing that out. Unthanks for calling me a douchebag. I wasn't calling anyone out- I was asking how does someone use that many scenes.

I totally get why a dj playing a diverse crowd would need 100s of scenes or better browsing than Live offers.

yeah uh, wasn't talking to you.
so i guess i didn't call you a douche bag then, eh?

[oddstep]

Ha ha. Classic. I obviously need to chill the f**k out.. peace

[Muzik 4 Machines]

is this limitation real, cause its a deal breaker, i will go and get a refund on my deposit right away if it is, i have over 750 scenes im my live session set (only 24 tracks but way over 125 scenes, why this small number, it's ridiculous, my electribe has 256 patterns and it dates from 2001

the way my set is layed out is:
12 audio tracks as a mixer for external sources
8 audio tracks for sampler use
12 midi tracks for the drums
6 midi tracks for external HW synths

jsut for starting, i dumped my electribe patterns in live, so just that is 256 scenes (actually more like 400 since some patterns on the tribe wer dumped in multiple scenes for variations and fills

then of those scenes, some were used with 10-12 sample scenes over the same pattern, so on average, 1 pattern takes 10 scenes by 40 tracks

my live sets go from 1 hour to 10 hours marathon performances, so i need to have EVERYTHING available at all time cause i never plan a setlist in advance, always go with the flow and the crowd

for now i use a BCF to control whole scene launch so i can just scroll with the mouse and select the scene then press play on the controller

with tha apc, after scene 125 (and it means after like 25 minutes of music) i will need to move the red square scene by scene to get to scene 500 for example, thats totally impossible to spend 3 minutes clicking down on the APC, at least a good solution will be to let us move the red square with the mouse to select an area to control (i already use griid and it allows unlimited scenes without any issue (my issue is that the ipod is just too small for my fat fingers and the ipad out of my price range)

so is there a workaround to keep moving after scene 125 with the session overview in anyway or should i just get a refund and wait for some intelligent company to get a real ableton live controller for people who really play live?

should i just go with the really less attractive launchpad seeing at least this one handles 512 scenes (still not enough, but way better than a ridiculous 125

[Markemark]

is this limitation real, cause its a deal breaker, i will go and get a refund on my deposit right away if it is, i have over 750 scenes im my live session set (only 24 tracks but way over 125 scenes, why this small number, it's ridiculous, my electribe has 256 patterns and it dates from 2001

the way my set is layed out is:
12 audio tracks as a mixer for external sources
8 audio tracks for sampler use
12 midi tracks for the drums
6 midi tracks for external HW synths

jsut for starting, i dumped my electribe patterns in live, so just that is 256 scenes (actually more like 400 since some patterns on the tribe wer dumped in multiple scenes for variations and fills

then of those scenes, some were used with 10-12 sample scenes over the same pattern, so on average, 1 pattern takes 10 scenes by 40 tracks

my live sets go from 1 hour to 10 hours marathon performances, so i need to have EVERYTHING available at all time cause i never plan a setlist in advance, always go with the flow and the crowd

for now i use a BCF to control whole scene launch so i can just scroll with the mouse and select the scene then press play on the controller

with tha apc, after scene 125 (and it means after like 25 minutes of music) i will need to move the red square scene by scene to get to scene 500 for example, thats totally impossible to spend 3 minutes clicking down on the APC, at least a good solution will be to let us move the red square with the mouse to select an area to control (i already use griid and it allows unlimited scenes without any issue (my issue is that the ipod is just too small for my fat fingers and the ipad out of my price range)

so is there a workaround to keep moving after scene 125 with the session overview in anyway or should i just get a refund and wait for some intelligent company to get a real ableton live controller for people who really play live?

should i just go with the really less attractive launchpad seeing at least this one handles 512 scenes (still not enough, but way better than a ridiculous 125

Impressed!! What kind of system you running this set with?
and I think the launchpad handling 512 was a mistake, I believe its 64

[skatr2]

Havent tried on my 20, but on my 40, the scene skip options are limited to 125 scenes. Meaning you can skip down 25 per shift scene launch button. Past that you can scroll down 25 scenes at a time by holding shift, select the last row, then the down arrow (this shows the next 25 scenes). I imagine the two are similar though.

[Muzik 4 Machines]

just a lowly MBP 1st gen, as it doesnt make any sound nor fx (well 2 compressors on sampler tracks)
it plays drums on 2 electribes and 5 external synths (mks50 tx81z, nord micro, dx200 and a v256)
so it's not really taxing on the CPU but it makes for a damns huge liveset(long more than wide)

think is for a live show, i want to have everything available in case the mood asks for it or a cute girl asks for a song i can play)

i never press stop in a gig except for special fx, so stopping and loading another liveset is impracticable

i get that there is a way to scroll 5 scenes at a time, but would there be a way to map the cue or master fader to red rectangle height in the set, maybe with m4l or by modding the default MIDI scripts (like for the case of changing the arm buttons to function select)

at the moment i use my BCF to control live, on 1 preset the fader 8 is assigned to scene position (global) and the 4 buttons at the bottom right are mapped to +1, -1, scene launch and all stop (never used it yet tho lol the button is the only one dusty on the BCF)

this way i can scroll from scene to 500 in 1 sec then fine adjust the clip i want to start

the reason i'm getting an APC is to have more transitional control, instead of going from full scene 1 to full scene 2, i can bring scene 2 hats, snare, pad, etc into track 1 and make a really seemless transition (akin to the Rolands MC 505 and 909 MEGAMIX! function, which i really miss)



back to my puny laptop, it ususlly plays maybe 1 or 2 audio clip at a time (1 song uses 3 and i'm ashamed of it) so it doesnt tax the HD too much

i'm having MIDI overflow problem on the outs but i think it's because i use a single port interface plugged in my MOTU midi time piece of the serial/rs232 era for distribution when i should get a 8x8 midi interface to avoid overloading the bus in times when i have a 64th drum fill on the snare 32nd on the kick some crashes claps and hats, plus 5 hardware synths getting to their turnaround measure(in my case always the one bar where there is more notes) plus maybe pitch bend and mixer/fx automation all send through 1 port is probably killing it

last time i worked on that part it choked so bad playing the 15 MIDI tracks plus 2 audio files it actually slowed down the tempo LOL

anyway i talk too much, my system is barely a MIDI sequencer and having 700 scenes with average of 12 midi clips is not really taxing, but i needs navigationality

i'm still trying to assign every block of patterns to a program change on the esx (since the esx is stil the master clock and start/stop) but it wont bring my red square there so i'll still be screwed

i'm thinking out loud as i write as you can see


edit: @skatr2 (you replied while i typed) i'll try that, i'm sure there is a way to assign that parameter (scene skip) to the cue knob by fiddling around with the .py files, i'll start looking into that as soon as i get my unit, in the meantime i'm still doing MIDI transfers and arranging to get the whole electribe out of itself and into live