Ableton Forum

I'm importing 14 tracks from my production computer to my live pa environment, each with one instrument per track (no stems).

Ok, so I drag and drop them into Arrange View, setting warp at the bpm of the original tune.

Then I want to chop my tracks into 4 bar sections, to trigger with my Launchpad, scene by scene. At the moment they are in arrange view, and I press loop so that the resulting scenes will loop if I forget or don't want to go to the next scene immediately.

So my logic is that once the files are set to loop, I split them into the four bar sections and crop the clips en mass, and the loop points will be adjusted to the length of each file, nice easy function, job done!

BUT NO!! OH NO!! The loop points are not adjusted, they merely remain where the original (negative) point of the file originally exsisted.

THIS BLOWS!! BIGTIME!!

Somebody please tell me I'm overlooking a basic function, and that this is indeed entirely possible.

I'm not gonna go through each of over 400 clips and manually readjust the loop start point, please tell me I'm way off here lol..

EDIT: I've found a workaround, consolidate each four bar section and press loop for this section, still took me over half an hour to do one tune!

The thing is, the code is already in Live to accomplish this more or less. All it needs is a function that says "Consolidate Arrange View every four bars and enable Loop".. that's a five minute job, maybe a day to get a GUI together to present the function.. and we've got the Ableton Team working on things like Push, which is only reinventing a time old process of track creation and packaging it in a different way to push sales, when basic functionality is obviously not being thought about as a priority!

futech wrote:All it needs is a function that says "Consolidate Arrange View every four bars and enable Loop"

Its coming in Live 9 and its called "Consolidate Time to New Scene". You select a section of the Arrangement timeline and it pastes new, trimmed, looped, clips into the Session View as a Scene. Rinse and repeat.

1] Acquire new software.

2] Skip tutorials and documentation.

3] Start new project.

4] Blame software.

5] Profit!

Pitch Black wrote:

futech wrote:All it needs is a function that says "Consolidate Arrange View every four bars and enable Loop"

Its coming in Live 9 and its called "Consolidate Time to New Scene". You select a section of the Arrangement timeline and it pastes new, trimmed, looped, clips into the Session View as a Scene. Rinse and repeat.

Haha the irony, I've probably just blown my free upgrade they promised me last week coz I'm bein a moanin c*%t lol..

Great to see they are paying attention, although I would have thought this would have been sorted long ago!

Dont know if this is the best way, but try this:

import your 14 tracks into arranger
cut them after bars (select + Strg E)
Loop selection (Strg L), you only need to do it once...
select the first 14 4 bar clips and drag & drop them together at once into session view (hold them and press tab)
into one scene. then the next ones etc...
shouldnt take more then 5 minutes.

now try this with any other software...

cheers!

kirillov wrote:Dont know if this is the best way, but try this:

import your 14 tracks into arranger
cut them every 4 bars (select + Strg E)
select the first 14 4 bar clips and drag & drop them together at once into session view into one scene. then the next ones etc...
shouldnt take more then 5 minutes.

now try this with any other software...

cheers!

Well you'd think that would be it but it is true to say that loop points aren't adjusted for the cut sections. If you ask me it would make more sense if they were by default.

What you can do is do "crop clip(s)" in arrange before dragging them over, but might be nice if there was a simple way of doing it without making more audio files.

massenmedium wrote:

kirillov wrote:Dont know if this is the best way, but try this:

import your 14 tracks into arranger
cut them every 4 bars (select + Strg E)
select the first 14 4 bar clips and drag & drop them together at once into session view into one scene. then the next ones etc...
shouldnt take more then 5 minutes.

now try this with any other software...

cheers!

Well you'd think that would be it but it is true to say that loop points aren't adjusted for the cut sections. I f you ask me it would make more sense if they were by default.

What you can do is do "crop clip(s)" in arrange before dragging them over, but might be nice if there was a simple way of doing it without making more audio files.

I had to edit my post: I only needed to "loop selection" once, when I selected the first 4 bars. then every other cuts I
draged to session vew where also adjusted!

OK - simple three step method :

- Select each four bar section and do "split".

- Select all the split clips and do "crop clip(s)".

- Drag everything into Session.

kirillov wrote:I had to edit my post: I only needed to "loop selection" once, when I selected the first 4 bars. then every other cuts I draged to session vew where also adjusted!

Hmm, OK - that's better news I suppose but I don't see that happening and I'm not clear on how this works exactly. Also it's a bit fiddly - you are talking about selecting in the detail view I presume? So all the clips in the cut section need to be selected in the main view and then you select the section you want to loop in the detail view. So how does it know to do this in the next section. If it works like that it seems extremely dependent on doing things in the right order.

Anyway, luckily there are straightforward ways to do this.