Ableton Forum

If phaze cancellation does occure, then warp isnt doing anything. I ll take muffins word for it. I also kept on bouncing a warped track and strangely enough, it didnt change the sound. So then either the warp is REALLY good or it bounces without the warp points if no real warping (moved warp points) has been done. Either way, I was wrong and Im very happy about it

leisuremuffin wrote: prove me wrong.

I think - based on the phase cancellation experiment - you are right:

In a strictly controlled situation where you are recording one clip in beats mode, and comparing it to the same sample unwarped, they are identical

In real life projects are not so controlled - in the creative process we are creating samples from all sorts of sources in all sorts of ways, and creating / splitting / modifying clips in all sorts of combinations on the arrrange grid.

Some of these clips are beats, some complex - tempos both local and global do not always stay consistant and this sum aggregation of all these things adds up to the percieved sound quality difference

Especially for people coming from a non-Live background - they are not aware of all these things let alone keeping an eye on them to make sure they are not inadvertently modifying the sound with clips that are not using the 'right' mode for the purpose

So I still think the warping is at the root of the percieved sound quality thing for this reason. Its real -- people I have talked to are professionals that have really good ears, they are definitely hearing it and I think this is the only reason that makes sense

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i love how people keep missing the point. if you use warp, it will affect sound quality. if you don't use warp -- that is, you're recording at a constant tempo and use beats mode, just have warp on for loop -- there's no effect on sound quality. (fwiw, i've tested this, inverting phase of a song playing in session via looping and the same song cut and pasted into arrange, cancellation.) so your appeal to authority (people with really good ears) doesn't really wash with me, unless you're talking about things where warp is being use to change tempo (and then, of course, audio quality does change, you're just talking about whether live's time stretching algorithm sounds as good as other time stretching).

double sigh.

dj superflat wrote: if you use warp, it will affect sound quality.

Ok ..

if you don't use warp -- that is, you're recording at a constant tempo and use beats mode, just have warp on for loop -- there's no effect on sound quality.

You lost me here. Warp is on. And now you're saying there's no effect

Which is it.

your appeal to authority (people with really good ears) doesn't really wash with me,

There's no "appeal to authority", and honestly - although I think this program is great and I use it, teach it, and and use it in business - I have no stake in proving a point either way.

Ive used it for a long time, Ive read peoples impressions here for a long time, Ive listened to a lot of (equally impartial) people that have been in the music / sound industry for a long time, and what I posted is what I think based on all of that

I think there is a difference and so do they. For my purposes (electronic music) its more than adequate for what I do. But for other people its enough that they would rather use something else as thier primary DAW.

I think i explained my theory on the reasons why pretty well. But im not emotionally involved enough in this issue to want to bother trying to convince anybody of it

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using warp means that the warp engine is actually doing something.

it's been proven that with beats, texture, and tones mode the warp engine does nothing when the orig. tempo of the clip matches that of the current song.




there is an old zen story about a western student who comes to an old zen master to study. The master invites the student into his chamber and prepares some tea. As the master is preparing the tea, the student talks and talks about his deep academic understanding of zen. The master pours tea into the students cup and does not stop when the cup is full. He continues to pour tea into the cup and it overflows onto the table. He continues this for a while and finally the student stops talking about zen and says "stop! the cup is full, you can't pour any more tea into it." The master stops and says " you are like the tea cup, how can i teach you anything uless you empty your mind first."



so, you will need to empty your cup before you can go further. What you have convinced yourself to be true may not be.




.lm.

i love warp and use it creativly all the time, so please all just shut up.

leisuremuffin wrote:you will need to empty your cup before you can go further. What you have convinced yourself to be true may not be.

If you read my explanation above, of why this perception of audio quality difference will not go away, then this is what makes the most sense if you consider the big picture.

Regardless of how important it is for some people to defend Ableton at all costs:

This perception is a real one and people are independently (outside of this board) coming to this conclusion - whether regulars here on the board .. or the company ... want to believe otherwise or not.

Again - I'm not 'emotionally involved' in this one way or another. A lot of the people that like to argue this point are ... i recognize that. It doesnt change what I'm saying

Since the summing bus is basically the same, and the phase cancellation experiments are proving that (in some cases) its the same, what is left?

It has something to do with the warping - and probably clip parameter tweaks - in aggregate. People are not running one clip in one mode in isolation, there are many tracks running many clips in many modes and many parameter tweaks.
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Usually, when I record a multitrack drum, I turn off warp entirely, just cutting the outta beat pieces and turning warp on for it.

So am I wrong? According to what lm said, if I leave warp turned on and just tweak on the offtempo parts, that would be the same as the mentioned above, without loosing my time cutting and turning warp on and off.

more than one person can be wrong.



anyway, yes, i do think that people often use warp without realizing it and then say, "live sounds bad."

But when i say they *use* warp by accident i mean that they import a file of a different tempo or change the tempo of the project. If they simply work at the same tempo, warp will be irrelavent if used in beats, texture, and tones mode. This is true. It doesn't matter how many times you cut the file and move it around in arrangement. It doesn't matter if the file came from somewhere else. What matters is that if the orig. tempo of the clip matches the tempo of the project, the sound will not be affected. That is what we are talking about at the moment. Do you understand?


of course when warp is used it affects the sound quality. As time stretch and compress does in any environment. ever.

But you are ignoring the fundamental point of this thread. Should i say it again? -----> warp does not affect the sound when the orig tempo of the clip mtches the tempo of the project using most warp modes. Not is most cases, not with certain exceptions. In all cases.



.lm.

Josh, I can totally appreciate your sentiments, but unless one is prepared to actually do some tests to prove what your "perception" tells you, then the debate will never rise above a theoretical and / or relative one, such as "this colour blue is prettier - I know it to be true, because I perceive it to be so".

While using Live I too get a "sense" of Live doing "something" to the sound when recording, looping etc. But I cannot attribute this to anything other than my *awareness* of what is going on in the background, not audible differences.

what he said re warp being on (i'm using "on" to mean actually doing something, and thus affecting audio, not just in warp mode, but at same tempo so no effect on audio).

leisuremuffin wrote: of course when warp is used it affects the sound quality. As time stretch and compress does in any environment. ever.

Of course it does. And Live likes to force clips to have warping on by default.

And people run projects with sometimes hundreds of clips, all of them with warping on.

And they dont always - in fact, almost never (in reality) check every single sample to make sure that it was recorded at exactly the same tempo as the project they are pulling it into.

They go into the browser and pull the clips in, and Live warps them, and they just use them that way and / or start tweaking parameters and forget that they did.

The end result is that the project "sounds different" - and in a lot of cases this means a loss of hi-end (because of smearing on the transients) and a 'lack of openness' or stereo separation.

This is what I am saying

But you are ignoring the fundamental point of this thread.

The fundamental point of the thread - I think - is that yet another person out of many, many people over time has come on this board wanting to turn the warping off and keep it off.

And again - the regulars on the board attack them with arguments about the warping and how it makes no difference.

But it does - for the real world reasons I'm saying here, it does

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Heinz Graaf wrote:If phaze cancellation does occure, then warp isnt doing anything. I ll take muffins word for it. I also kept on bouncing a warped track and strangely enough, it didnt change the sound. So then either the warp is REALLY good or it bounces without the warp points if no real warping (moved warp points) has been done. Either way, I was wrong and Im very happy about it

There, the person who started the thread learned something. did you?





yes josh, if warp is being used it will affect the sound. as we've all said a billion times, that means if warp is actually doing something to the file.

you can have warp enabled on a clip, and if the tempo matches the project tempo it does nothing.


you must be aware of this when working in live. It is the price you pay for using a tool that allows you to bring in audio of a differrent tempo and have it play back at the tempo of your project right away. This is not how regular DAWs work. You need to man up a little bit.



.lm.

leisuremuffin wrote: It is the price you pay for using a tool that allows you to bring in audio of a differrent tempo and have it play back at the tempo of your project right away. This is not how regular DAWs work.

Yes and I think a lot of people are not taking this into account when they start talking about sound quality differences.

This is exactly what I'm saying

You need to man up a little bit.

I dont have any idea what you mean by this

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In the tune I am working on right now I have tracks recorded from MPC, there are not changes of tempo, yet if I switch off the warp, there is obvious difference- so I switched them off.
I am not a geek but musician and producer if I hear a difference I do what i got to do. You can do tests till cows come home, i care how it sounds and less why, or by some theory it should be otherwise.
I dont deliver the clients or listeners "it is actually better like that" but whtever can sound the best.