Ableton Forum

I've had Live for a week or so now and there is already a silly problem I can't seem to get around. I could sort it in seconds using Logic/Reason 6/Pro Tools, but I REALLY want to know that Live is not that poorly featured. I hope you can enlighten me and get me excited about this product again as I'm feeling a little let down at present.

I have exported solo audio parts from a Logic project for import into Live. Most are exactly 4 or 8 bars in length, with easily detectable transients - no problem. However,I have exported less rhythmic material at less obvious bar lengths and this is confusing Live, but I can't find a way to help it.

Take my pad. I exported a 9 bar chunk, even though the actual chord progression is only 4 bars. This is because I want to edit these 9 bars in 3 different ways to create 3 clips. I have used this technique for years with hardware and software samplers.It has served me well:

1) The first 4 bars, so as to preserve the gentle attack when the pad commences with no 'tail' from any preceding chords
2) Bars 5 to 9, so that I get a loopable chunk to repeat ad infinitum, and
3) Bars 5 to 10, so that when the pad ends, I get the necessary release tail of the last chord.

I didn't export these three chunks separately in Logic as I foolishly thought that I could learn how to edit them in Live...

Now, when I import this 9 bar clip into the session view, it reads the tempo as 96bpm (when it should be 120) and warps it into an obvious mess. There is a 'button' called 'seg.bpm' in the clip editor which reads 96, but I cannot change this.

"TURN WARP OFF!" I hear you cry - well that's the real problem. If I do, the clip waveform editor jumps from a useful bar/beats timeline, to a minutes/seconds/frames SMPTE style one with no snap values - so I would have to edit the 3 individual chunks outlined above to a precise loopable length BY EAR - which is not easy with a lush, slow pad sound.

I know that I can edit the chunks with a snap value in arrange view, and then put them back in session view, but they don't loop. Vital for chunk 2 in particular.

So, I would like to know if I can either:

1) Tell Live that this audio clip is 9 bars long so that it warps it accordingly?
2) Override the wrongly analysed 'seg. bpm' value in the clip editor?
3) Get a snappable bars/beats timeline in the clip editor waveform display when I turn warp off?

Any of these should sort the issue - but if you have any other workarounds, or if there is a blindingly obvious feature I am missing, please make me feel stupid because it would be better than thinking I've just spent several hundred quid on a musical lemon!

Sorted point 2 after trawling the forums. Leave warp on, click on the warp marker in the waveform editor, THEN the seg. bpm can be changed.

However, I'd still like to know if the other points are do-able...

For 1), put a warp marker at the beginning and end of the clip, and (assuming it's 9 bars long) drag those to the 1.1.1 and 10.1.1 positions on the beatgrid - this is how you "tell" Live how long it's supposed to be. Everything should line up. I believe you will get the same alignment by using the one marker and correcting the "seg. bpm" setting, though.

Turning warping off is only helpful if you put the clip on the arrangement view and never change the global tempo - the point of warping a clip is to keep the clip in musical time even when you change the tempo of the whole project.

Personally I think it'd be useful to see bars/beats in the clip editor timeline for the current tempo even when warping is off, but AFAIK that's not a feature Live has yet. You can see this in the arrangement view though, if you have the clip on the timeline, but I'm not sure if that helps you.

Hope this was of some help.

Thanks a lot Warrior Bob.

I'm pretty sure it was one of your helpful replies to someone else's query that got me round point 2 in the first place. You the man!

I have to say though, it does seem odd that I need to involve the warp engine for such a simple task - Ableton warps it incorrectly and glitchily, and I have to warp it back into shape. I'm sure this is all fine, but I do get worried about whether the loop is EXACTLY as it should be. With all due respect to Live's timestretch algorithms, they are amongst the best out there, but they are far from perfect. I also worry about whether unnecessary processor power is being used to analyse/adjust clips in realtime that don't need it. I'm all for efficiency!

As regards changing the tempo - I'm sure that when I get round to tackling remixes and mashups on Live this will be invaluable - but for now I just want to know if I can perform high quality renditions of my Logic / Reason projects using my new APC40 and Ableton. Hence my paranoia about what the warping may be doing to my precious babies...

Still, despite it's quirks, Ableton is the best fun I've had for ages!

But then I don't get out much...

beatmunga wrote:Thanks a lot Warrior Bob.

I'm pretty sure it was one of your helpful replies to someone else's query that got me round point 2 in the first place. You the man!

Oh, thanks! Glad I could help. Just paying it forward for all the people who've helped me over the years. :D

Anyway, here's like a billion more words from me that are hopefully somewhat useful:

beatmunga wrote:I have to say though, it does seem odd that I need to involve the warp engine for such a simple task - Ableton warps it incorrectly and glitchily, and I have to warp it back into shape. I'm sure this is all fine, but I do get worried about whether the loop is EXACTLY as it should be. With all due respect to Live's timestretch algorithms, they are amongst the best out there, but they are far from perfect. I also worry about whether unnecessary processor power is being used to analyse/adjust clips in realtime that don't need it. I'm all for efficiency!

These are legitimate complaints. And I think you're right - unless you plan to change the tempo of your project, I don't see any reason to use warping. If 'warp' is disabled for an audio clip, then that clip will play back at its original speed regardless of the global tempo. If you're getting these clips from another DAW project at the same tempo, then they're probably quite rigidly locked to tempo and have very precise lengths. I don't see why you couldn't just drop them into the arrangement view and cut/loop them (use the split feature!) as you need. You should see the beginning and end of those clips line up perfectly onto the bar lines in arrangement.

And you're quite right, the timestretch algorithms aren't perfect, and there's good reason to suspect they're messing with your clips. I forget where it is (back of the manual, I think?) but Ableton did a bunch of testing and showed that most of the warp modes actually preserve the original clip perfectly, but only so long as the "seg.bpm" and the global tempo are exactly 100% the same. This is, however, not true for the two complex warp modes - while these tend to generally sound closer to the original at different tempos, they do not preserve the original signal perfectly accurately, ever, not even at the original tempo. They're different tools for different purposes.

But now that you know this, you can do things like using beats mode, and warping your clips at the precise tempo you're project is at, if you simply must warp them for whatever reason (looping them in Session View is one example where you probably want to do this). And of course, if you're using warping to create nifty timestretching special effects, then go to town; at that point the idea is to specifically ruin the original signal instead of preserving it.

Incidentally, the non-complex warp modes use far less processor power than the complex ones do, but don't spend too much time worrying about resources unless you expect to come up on a real-world limitation. Otherwise you'll spend all your time chasing down optimizations instead of actually producing things.

While I've found warping to be pretty intuitive for general stretching, I do find it to be a bit fiddly for really precise work. I've found that if I want a clip to just have one marker at the project's current tempo, I seem to need to do things in a particular order. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something somewhere, but the way I do it is like this:
- Load up the unwarped clip
- Put the start marker on the downbeat (i.e. wherever I want the "beginning" of the clip to be)
- Click "warp" on for that clip
- Right-click my start marker and choose "set 1.1.1 here"
If I do it this way, I seem to be able to get around Live trying to warp the clip itself, and I end up with a clip with one marker with a seg. bpm of whatever my project's tempo currently is.

beatmunga wrote:Still, despite it's quirks, Ableton is the best fun I've had for ages!

But then I don't get out much...

Your homework is to go out, get drunk and laid, and then come back in and use that to improve your sound. Music is for people and the things they do, doubly so if you're performing. But now I'm philosophizing. :)

EDIT: Go forth and kick ass

Thanks again Warrior Bob, that's given me a lot more insight into the workings of Live.

I did actually put my 9 bars of unwarped pad onto the arrange view in the end, then cut them to the required segments. However, I then cut and paste them back into the session view, where I used the initial marker trick in warp mode to get them to launch & loop as you have said.

This is because, after many years of the tyranny of timeline based arrange pages on Cubase/Logic/Pro Tools/Reason, I felt uncomfortable doing what comes so naturally! Getting away from that, and using session view whenever possible, is the big selling point of Live for me. Plus, the APC doesn't make much sense in arrange, I guess.

As regards creative timestretching - looking forward to that. Reminds me of the fun I had with my old Akai S950. It's this background in hardware that tends to make me a little over concerned with 'optimizations' etc - it wasn't that long ago that I used to have to record a song's vocals at half the sample rate just to fit them all in my EMU sampler's RAM for instance. But those days are gone - old habits die hard and all that. You're right - I need to chill out and just get playing.

As regards your order to 'go out, get drunk, get laid' - I'm married, so those 3 avenues of pleasure are but a memory. Perhaps that's why my songs are so dull...? Hmmm

Oh yeah, no problem at all! I'm glad it worked out. Thanks for being awesome and asking great questions.

beatmunga wrote:As regards creative timestretching - looking forward to that. Reminds me of the fun I had with my old Akai S950. It's this background in hardware that tends to make me a little over concerned with 'optimizations' etc - it wasn't that long ago that I used to have to record a song's vocals at half the sample rate just to fit them all in my EMU sampler's RAM for instance. But those days are gone - old habits die hard and all that.

You're definitely right about old habits! I tend to think in software just because that's what I have (I got a late start a few years ago, and already had a computer so I didn't buy much hardware), but even there, most of my habits come from Reaper, so I'm constantly making little mistakes in Session view just because I'm thinking about it wrong.

I've found that, at least on modern computer hardware, I can generally not even worry about optimization until I'm at about 50% CPU usage, which is where I start to get uncomfortable about trusting it and start freezing clips or using cheaper warping modes. It's a loose rule of thumb but it's worked out for me. But you're quite right - this is only because hard drive space is comparatively cheap and it's not like working with hardware samplers at all. Resources are more generalized.

beatmunga wrote:As regards your order to 'go out, get drunk, get laid' - I'm married, so those 3 avenues of pleasure are but a memory. Perhaps that's why my songs are so dull...? Hmmm

Hahahaha, fair enough! Ah well, I was being facetious anyway.

If you've got some online, do PM me a link to some of your music, I'd love to hear what you're up to.