Live + 3rd party plugins = FAIL

[hdrpbx]

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=108587

i remember i pointed out some PDC related problems two years ago, mainly the gui being totally out of sync with the audio out, think it was my first post on the forum actually, but got no real answer on why and what caused this problem, i had to figure it outmyself, or rather suppose.
nice to finally know it werent just speculations

anyway after that project i was talking about in that thred i started using plugin chains in a different way , mainly not more than two or three 3d party plugs per track than freeze and flatten,a bit constrictive as a workaround but it solves me many problems

still hope PDC will be totally revised for future versions

[jeff_u]

And people wonder why theres always people who bitch about the sound quality of live.. This would absolutely start to make your mix phasy and sound like shit... The more plugs you get rolling, the worse it starts to sound.. This has been going on for ages with this program.

But were all still crazy and need to go clean our ears out and do the quadrupal blind test.

I love live, but honestly, with this many bugs with such senstive audio data, I don't know how any of you defend this program and its sound quality. I guess fanboys will be fanboys...

Agreed.

[Franz-Olof]

I read this thread. It worries me.

I draw two conclusions.

1) I wait.

2) I want to know how to work to minimalize the problem. Could somebody tell as telling a three year old that how can we achieve that?

[Tone Deft]

listen to your plug ins, if they sound like crap, don't use them. if they work OK, fine. you can also learn how to test plug ins yourself.

strike me as odd that with all this noise there's zero effort to try to find which ones work and which ones don't.

me, I don't use many third party plug ins. this is bugging but I'm not really tripping out about it.

[wayfinder]

listen to your plug ins, if they sound like crap, don't use them. if they work OK, fine. you can also learn how to test plug ins yourself.

strike me as odd that with all this noise there's zero effort to try to find which ones work and which ones don't.

me, I don't use many third party plug ins. this is bugging but I'm not really tripping out about it.

dude, read the thread, this isn't about how good or bad plugins sound, it's about delay compensation

[Tone Deft]

/facepalm

[LoopStationZebra]

//facepalm

[Khazul]

+1

[Franz-Olof]

mmm... this three year old did not understand anything... got just a very greasy face

[jtdj]

Hi Folks,

just wanted to chime in and confirm a few things, so you don't have to waste too much studio time discussing technical speculations or checking test scenarios to find out what exactly happens in Live and what not - you're right in stating that it is our job to explain this!

In short: Live's Plugin Delay Compensation compensates the audio.

What it does not, is compensating automation or what the Live GUI is showing (moving meters etc.), just as we always stated.

Even more important for this thread: timing depending plugins like camelspace or beatrepeat poll the transport timing information from the host to work correctly in time. In Live's case, as well with some other hosts, all plugins get the same global timing and normally this is just fine, of course - but as soon as such a timing depending plugin sits behind another plugin that causes latency, it would need its own special timing information that incorporates also the latency that gets introduced before it receives its data. But as i mentioned: Live does not offer this feature yet, just as it does not offer automation compensation - and both are pretty huge points on the feature wishlist.

Therefore ninox_rufa is pretty spot on in the descriptions he posted in this thread and we also confirmed this to him via support emails months ago.
If it would have been a bug, i'm pretty sure we would have addressed it by now during the quality initiative.
But unfortunately it is not something that is broken but actually a wish for new features based on the basic PDC (a. compensating automations, b. compensating host timing information based on where the plugin sits, c. GUI compensation) which cannot be hacked together in a few hours or days.

Nevertheless, we already said we will address these feature wishes and this statement still holds true.
But as always with Ableton products - we can't make any promises or announcements regarding the timeframe for this. Sorry for this.

What also already has been said is that as long as those delay compensation features are missing, we have to work on the manual in order to explain the situation better as it is confusing to the customer right now. And this came personally from the man who takes care of the manual, so we can trust this statement (http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=129443).

I hope this clears up the confusion a bit. We really don't want to hide facts or information about such things and if there are further technical questions regarding this topic, feel free to contact support@ableton.com anytime for an answer, as it is hard to keep track of all the posts in the forum.

Cheers,
Dom

so can anyone recommend a DAW that does have this feature? I've been thinking about switching for a while and this info is the final straw. Recomendations please?

[LeifonMars]

Hi Folks,

just wanted to chime in and confirm a few things, so you don't have to waste too much studio time discussing technical speculations or checking test scenarios to find out what exactly happens in Live and what not - you're right in stating that it is our job to explain this!

In short: Live's Plugin Delay Compensation compensates the audio.

What it does not, is compensating automation or what the Live GUI is showing (moving meters etc.), just as we always stated.

Even more important for this thread: timing depending plugins like camelspace or beatrepeat poll the transport timing information from the host to work correctly in time. In Live's case, as well with some other hosts, all plugins get the same global timing and normally this is just fine, of course - but as soon as such a timing depending plugin sits behind another plugin that causes latency, it would need its own special timing information that incorporates also the latency that gets introduced before it receives its data. But as i mentioned: Live does not offer this feature yet, just as it does not offer automation compensation - and both are pretty huge points on the feature wishlist.

Therefore ninox_rufa is pretty spot on in the descriptions he posted in this thread and we also confirmed this to him via support emails months ago.
If it would have been a bug, i'm pretty sure we would have addressed it by now during the quality initiative.
But unfortunately it is not something that is broken but actually a wish for new features based on the basic PDC (a. compensating automations, b. compensating host timing information based on where the plugin sits, c. GUI compensation) which cannot be hacked together in a few hours or days.

Nevertheless, we already said we will address these feature wishes and this statement still holds true.
But as always with Ableton products - we can't make any promises or announcements regarding the timeframe for this. Sorry for this.

What also already has been said is that as long as those delay compensation features are missing, we have to work on the manual in order to explain the situation better as it is confusing to the customer right now. And this came personally from the man who takes care of the manual, so we can trust this statement (http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=129443).

I hope this clears up the confusion a bit. We really don't want to hide facts or information about such things and if there are further technical questions regarding this topic, feel free to contact support@ableton.com anytime for an answer, as it is hard to keep track of all the posts in the forum.

Cheers,
Dom

so can anyone recommend a DAW that does have this feature? I've been thinking about switching for a while and this info is the final straw. Recomendations please?

Could not care less about you switching to another daw, I'm just being curious how is this the final straw in your decision making? Do you understand the problem and have you ever noticed it? Why is it exactly you chose Live in a first place?

[jtdj]

Hi Folks,

just wanted to chime in and confirm a few things, so you don't have to waste too much studio time discussing technical speculations or checking test scenarios to find out what exactly happens in Live and what not - you're right in stating that it is our job to explain this!

In short: Live's Plugin Delay Compensation compensates the audio.

What it does not, is compensating automation or what the Live GUI is showing (moving meters etc.), just as we always stated.

Even more important for this thread: timing depending plugins like camelspace or beatrepeat poll the transport timing information from the host to work correctly in time. In Live's case, as well with some other hosts, all plugins get the same global timing and normally this is just fine, of course - but as soon as such a timing depending plugin sits behind another plugin that causes latency, it would need its own special timing information that incorporates also the latency that gets introduced before it receives its data. But as i mentioned: Live does not offer this feature yet, just as it does not offer automation compensation - and both are pretty huge points on the feature wishlist.

Therefore ninox_rufa is pretty spot on in the descriptions he posted in this thread and we also confirmed this to him via support emails months ago.
If it would have been a bug, i'm pretty sure we would have addressed it by now during the quality initiative.
But unfortunately it is not something that is broken but actually a wish for new features based on the basic PDC (a. compensating automations, b. compensating host timing information based on where the plugin sits, c. GUI compensation) which cannot be hacked together in a few hours or days.

Nevertheless, we already said we will address these feature wishes and this statement still holds true.
But as always with Ableton products - we can't make any promises or announcements regarding the timeframe for this. Sorry for this.

What also already has been said is that as long as those delay compensation features are missing, we have to work on the manual in order to explain the situation better as it is confusing to the customer right now. And this came personally from the man who takes care of the manual, so we can trust this statement (http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=129443).

I hope this clears up the confusion a bit. We really don't want to hide facts or information about such things and if there are further technical questions regarding this topic, feel free to contact support@ableton.com anytime for an answer, as it is hard to keep track of all the posts in the forum.

Cheers,
Dom

so can anyone recommend a DAW that does have this feature? I've been thinking about switching for a while and this info is the final straw. Recomendations please?

Could not care less about you switching to another daw, I'm just being curious how is this the final straw in your decision making? Do you understand the problem and have you ever noticed it? Why is it exactly you chose Live in a first place?

crashing during gigs, crashing during gigs and crashing during gigs. Yes I understand the problem and yes I was working on a remix the other day and had to automate things out of time on the screen to get them in time on the audio, i assumed it was another bug infact is just something ableton can't do. i started on cubase but switched to live for its live features and then started using it as my main sequencer. the latest version has done my head in, constantly crashing during production and recording sessions, crashing on me 3 seperate occasions during gigs which is a total embaressment, no 64-bit support, poor standard of built in fx (the new amp is shit) add to that this unfixable problem and ableton is becoming more a toy, less a proffesional DAW. It does my head in.

[Tone Deft]

scutheotakukato - you'd better put this on. the interweb hath no fury like a user scorned.




what you're missing is that there are definitely work flows, features and patterns of commands that you have never tried but others use all the time without success.

I agree that people need to honestly check their system out and learn how to properly use the software before going off on its stability but it's a blanket statement that simply is not true. one such user that comes to mind is taximouse. a touring musician that knows her shit, depends on Live and worked for months to try to figure out why she was having problems.

[Khazul]

so can anyone recommend a DAW that does have this feature? I've been thinking about switching for a while and this info is the final straw. Recomendations please?

Well cubase 6 does, but TBH while the latency quirks/non-features with Live do hugely piss me off at times, just general workflow in cubase pisses me far more. TBH - its not that live gets it wrong, it more than it gets it wrong sometimes - ie inconsistenly that causes a huge amount of wasted time - not much fun when you fix something in session view, copy it back to arrange and the frigin thing is out of time again on top of all the wasted time listening to something over and over again to try to work out WTF is wrong, thinking were going nuts cos the energy and bounce that was there before seems to have just gone.

In general I find it less disruptive to bounce the audio and avoid the problem when you hit it than trying to do a 'complex' (from and routing and processing perpective rather than large number of tracks perpecive) project in Cubase with seems to demand the kind of pre-planning of a large IT project.

The headache is realising the 3rd party randomness case is actually happening. Great when its blatently wrong, but just very subtley wrong either wastes a hell of alo of time second guessing etc or if uncaught could actually kill a track completely because you never re-examined it objectively and realsed it had become lifeless in some subtle way.

[Khazul]

Pro Tools now has delay compensation (yes - before the version that just recently came out, it did not have it). It's also got a brand new frontend along with third party hardware support (and I think VST support too?). I haven't tried it, but it might be worth considering - Computer Music Magazine gave it a good review.

The only other DAW I would consider investing in at the mo is Logic - as I dont yet have a mac, then backup plan for now is cubase 6