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Abelton 4 Demo misleading

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2004 9:00 am
by speedbird
When I first heard the inlcuded Demo song from Live 4 I thought that the stretch algorithm works quite well, only to see that Ableton did something very clever!

Most of the loops have been recorded at the same tempo the demo song is playing. Well, no suprise the stretching sounds perfect.
You change the tempo, slow it down and it falls apart.

I hate to say it but ACID (no matter which version) still works much better in this regards. There is no tweaking involved. You just load a loop and then coose any tempo. The sound quality is always ok.

It's a shame because Live is superior in any other aspect, but before Ableton brings in more features and makes Live a full blown sequencer I would like to see improvements on the core feature of this program and that is real-time stretching/looping/warping.

Why can Live still not read ACID'iced loops/markers?
There are huge sound libraries for ACID out there but they don't play right.

I own 250GB of ACIS sounds, they all have hand-tuned transient markers that Live can't read.

What a shame!!

I know for that to work Live has to introduce the ability to move/add/remove transient markers indepentently from beat/position markers.

But that would be a great feature!

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2004 9:06 am
by bensuthers
I'm sure it's very important to ableton to support reading and writing of acid files.

that's why they've left it out.

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2004 1:01 pm
by Guest
try messing with all of the time stretch settings, it can help a lot...

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2004 1:13 pm
by Moonburnt
Anonymous wrote:try messing with all of the time stretch settings, it can help a lot...
The default transient setting is 1/16th. Often I find 1/8th to be better so long as the tempo is reasonably close to the original. Bigger chunks so less stutter. Of course if the clip is primarily 16th notes, it's not so smart.

I don't have any acidized loops, but I hear what you're saying speedbird...it's a bit of a de facto standard, so more compatibility is always cool. As far as sound quality goes, within a reasonable range, live does the job and the capabilities outweigh the artifacts. In fact sometimes i like the artifacts. It sounds like Live. Maybe in 20 yrs there'll be a plugin for that sound like we have sample & bitcrushers today?

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2004 1:15 pm
by noisetonepause
IME - Nine times out of ten, Live will do a perfectly adequate job of time-stretching your loops, provided you takes your time to tweak the settings.

-Paws

Re: Abelton 4 Demo misleading

Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2004 5:01 pm
by MarkH
speedbird wrote:I hate to say it but ACID (no matter which version) still works much better in this regards. There is no tweaking involved. You just load a loop and then coose any tempo. The sound quality is always ok.
You have to be kidding me? The whole point of moving warp markers is to fix the timing. If a guitarist or violin player performs a nice take but the timing is slightly off, you can fix it.

Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2004 8:27 am
by Robert Henke
Indeed, we did not improve the time strech for Live 4.
Not that we think it is perfect the way it is now, we just had no
time to work on it. Getting MIDI done did eat up all developper resources. But the streching quality is one of the issues which has a pretty high priority on our future developments schedule. There are things to come.

Robert
Ableton

Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2004 9:44 am
by peeddrroo
Robert Henke wrote: There are things to come.
i love to hear that, say it again Robert :wink:

Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2004 10:50 am
by Pitch Black
Robert Henke wrote: There are things to come.
Why do I hear a huge fuckoff thunderclap with that statement? :D :D :D