(Dynamic) Time Display

Share what you’d like to see added to Ableton Live.
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gfea
Posts: 20
Joined: Sun Jan 02, 2005 8:20 pm
Location: Athens, Ga

(Dynamic) Time Display

Post by gfea » Wed May 11, 2005 6:43 pm

I prefer to use Live 4.0 as my main audio sequencer. I know Live is not intended to replace Cubase, Pro Tools, and the like, but for me, it gets the job done. There is, however, one feature that most all audio sequencers have that is missing from Live- a time display. You know, the song (Arrangement) starts at beat 1.1.1, which would be 00:00:00 in linear time, then the minutes and seconds increase as the song progresses.

One obvious complication of this is the fact that Live is capable of tempo automation, but I think the way around this is some kind of "dynamic" time calculation function within Live's engine- For example, if you enabled the "Time" display, Live would calculate the elapsed time in the arrangement view in REAL TIME from the start of the arrangement. That way, regardless of what tempo you're using, etc, you could always jump to a point in the song based on time instead of measures. This feature could also be disabled (unchecked) to conserve CPU power.

This feature would be invaluable to anyone with time-based needs, ie, scoring. I recently did a project in Live for a coreographed trapeze performance for my friend LPP, and had to constantly monitor the length of the song as I made edits. The only way I knew to do this was to render the song periodically and check the overall length of the rendered file, which was quite time-consuming, as I did MANY edits a day over the course of a week.

I refuse to buy Pro Tools!

Peace, GFEA

peeddrroo
Posts: 4775
Joined: Fri Mar 26, 2004 10:25 pm
Location: France

Post by peeddrroo » Wed May 11, 2005 10:42 pm

hmmm....
did you have a look at the bottom of the arrangement display?
i think these numbers are actually minutes and seconds...

gfea
Posts: 20
Joined: Sun Jan 02, 2005 8:20 pm
Location: Athens, Ga

Post by gfea » Sun May 15, 2005 6:23 am

Yeah, but I was thinking more like a traditional "stopwatch" display. Good point, though.

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