Ableton Forum

It's rubbish,ok? Totally half baked. I still use live everyday, but they have set the bar low with this afterthought of a feature. And forget about bitwig, they just copied it and made it waaay worse. I sound old when i say "Recycle" now.


Remember the days when you couldn't preview a sample before loading? Well that's effectively still where we are with Ableton Live's "slice to midi" feature.

discuss.

What exactly do you want to be different about it?

It seems a lot of people get plenty of use out of it.

my main gripe is that you can't adjust sample start/end position via midi / push. if your chops don't come out how you want them, it is quite tedious to fix it with a mouse..

yur2die4 wrote:What exactly do you want to be different about it?

It seems a lot of people get plenty of use out of it.

yeah i do too, after i am forced to used Recycle (decades old) to do the auditioning and chopping (making a rex file). It is not possible to listen to the slices, as you would need, before spreading them across the keys.

It IS half-baked. There is no escaping that.

who else agrees?

I always slice by warp marker or I have all the samples spaced on even intervals... so I'm having a great time with it lol.

It sounds like he is referring to a 'preview' function. I guess I don't know what I'm missing, I haven't used recycle before . There are a lot of ways to make slices, even without slice to midi! (Arrangement view slice by hand then drag n drop).

The idea is that you set up your warp markers first, get everything right (and remember you can preview the slices with the curosr when it turns into a speaker icon at the top of the audio editor, though I realize this is clunky at best) and THEN you do the "slice to MIDI" command and choose "by warp markers." As long as you know your way around the warp marker system in the audio clip editor, most of the expected functionality is there, though certainly not everything...

Honestly, though, it could be smoother and more intuitive. I do all my slicing on Maschine now, and its' lightyears beyond Live. The ability to preview every slice immediately across the pads, easily adjust start/end points *that can overlap with other slices* etc. it just feels way more fluid and intuitive, going back to live slicing would be very annoying for me at this point... so I guess I agree after all?

Starts are always off and it's missing the audition button.It's shabby. This adds up to making it unusable as a slicing solution on complex material with a large dynamic range. Like long passages of nuanced, funky drumming. It's just way too tedious. It's never been a precise solution, but an afterthought.



The above image shows the poor detection of live in comparison to recycle.

Let me re-iterate, they left out the audition button on a "slicing solution", and the slices are not accurate. Multiply this problem by x number of slices, for x number of potential tracks, and it quickly becomes a "non"-solution, unless you wanna spend two days fighting for a tight multi layered drum performance.

The reason people get on with it as it is, is because they are using straight material, that the sloppy transient detection algo can deal with. Or they like sloppy badly sliced beats. Or they like RSI. or whatever. The point is it's rubbish and i really badly want them to improve it.

mholloway wrote: so I guess I agree after all?

yup

mholloway wrote:and remember you can preview the slices with the curosr when it turns into a speaker icon at the top of the audio editor

Just so I am understanding you correctly... Are you saying there is a way to preview sound from one warp marker to the next only??? I have been here many years and never heard of this. I know you can turn off global quantize and be able to play the clip from any portion of the clip, but doing this does not pay any attention to where warp markers are and furthermore does not stop upon reaching next warp marker... this way does not show if the warp marker has landed on the transient properly and allows you jump in too early or too late past the transient. Playing from start of one marker to the next and stopping is a slice preview... You know of a way to do this in Live???

Willyum wrote:

mholloway wrote:and remember you can preview the slices with the curosr when it turns into a speaker icon at the top of the audio editor

Just so I am understanding you correctly... Are you saying there is a way to preview sound from one warp marker to the next only??? I have been here many years and never heard of this. I know you can turn off global quantize and be able to play the clip from any portion of the clip, but doing this does not pay any attention to where warp markers are and furthermore does not stop upon reaching next warp marker... this way does not show if the warp marker has landed on the transient properly and allows you jump in too early or too late past the transient. Playing from start of one marker to the next and stopping is a slice preview... You know of a way to do this in Live???

You are correct in that what mholloway described is in no way a funtional preview/audition.

If you focus on an audio clip in the arrangement view, you can audition slices by following the instructions in my sig. But that is still very clunky and painful, and not possible to do in session view.

Set warp markers, slice to midi. Adjust as needed in Sampler/Simpler. It really doesn't get any easier.

dna598 wrote:It's rubbish,ok? Totally half baked. I still use live everyday, but they have set the bar low with this afterthought of a feature. And forget about bitwig, they just copied it and made it waaay worse. I sound old when i say "Recycle" now.


Remember the days when you couldn't preview a sample before loading? Well that's effectively still where we are with Ableton Live's "slice to midi" feature.

discuss.

I actually did Love the interface of Recycle. Especially when I first used it about 12-13 years ago. It really turned a 2-4 hour job to a 10 minute job. That said I think over time, Recycle kind of lost its niche. Most programs have built-in slicing now although Recycle had a unique approach to slicing with the Transient Slider which seemed to work pretty good.


Live's slicing I think is pretty good but it probably could use some improvements. I actually Like Live's zooming waaay better than Recycle so for manually chopping stuff, I think Ableton is alot better than Recycle. The only big gripes is that it doesn't have Recycle's Transient detection sensitivity and it doesn't add the stretch to the end of your chops which actually sounded really cool in many scenarios. Now I'd have to use delay if I need a similar effect.

Another gripe is that it keeps the original loop length and not the Stretched Warp marker length but this is pretty easy to work around by freezing.


That said both has its Pros and Cons. I'd say the biggest gripe with Recycle is that it really isn't integrated in any DAWS. You'd think that the Props would just bite the bullet and include it right in Reason but they only included a relatively light version of it.

I have Maschine and thought it's chopping was OK. I must be in the minority because I find Maschine a littly clunky especially when integrated with other DAWS.