Ableton Forum

Hi,

Not sure if anyone else has run into this, but I have an Operator sequence that sounds exactly like I want it when I listen to it inside of Live, but when I do a final export of my song, that sequence sounds a good bit worse. All other tracks sound fine and correct in the mix, even other Operator tracks. All tracks in my project are midi tracks. I have mixed and exported a lot of songs in Live, and have never seen this before, although I haven't done much with Operator before. I've been with Live since version 5, so I don't think I'm making noobie mistakes.

My setup:
- Live (suite) 8.0.5
- PC (IBM Thinkpad)
- Windows Vista


I am using my own operator settings, not a preset sound, but it's nothing incredible unusual. The only unsusual thing I do is create a custom map of one of the oscillator's partials (by just drawing in the map in the oscillator waveform editor), and gives me quite a unique 'beepy' sort of sound with odd harmonics. It is this exact beep sequence that isn't being reproduced correctly when I export to wav. It keeps the general tempo of the track fine, just not the exact sound. I also tried aif format, with and without dithering, 16 and 32 bit depth. All produced the same (undesirable) result. One thing I didn't do it export the final wav at 96KHz, as I don't have an wav player that handles 96Khz files.

It seems to me that something happens during export where Live cannot faithfully reproduce the exact set of partials that I have drawn for the waveform in Operator.

My only recourse at this point seems to be routing a monitor output out of my m-audio box and back in to an input and recording the input. Obviously not desirable.

Thanks for any help anyone can provide!!

OK, I have an update on the behavior. I took the project to a different laptop (another IBM Thinkpad) running Windows XP, and played the tracks inside of Live (8.0.5 suite) on that laptop. It had the same undesirable sound *inside* of Live as the final mixdown *outside* of Live on the other computer. This is @#$!&* baffling, to put it nicely. So, bottom line, the certain operator setting only plays like I want it to when I play it inside of Live on my laptop running Vista. I have a feeling I'm sorta screwed on this. . . Maybe it's a Vista thing, not sure. But usually Vista is giving undesirable results, not good ones Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?