Ableton Forum

Hi people.

So im preparing for a live show this weekend. I play full instrumental tracks with most instruments as clips, and over that we sing and add extra real time instruments. I warp the songs so that I can blend them together since its all about the same bpm and its dance oriented music (Housey), but I'm finding in Live 10 that some tunes are getting affected excessively by the warping algorithms, no matter which I use. Generally I go for complex; but what is happening is that my kicks are loosing consistency and they are playing at very random different volumes. Maybe something is messing their transients, and it only happens in tracks that are moved from their original BPM for over 10 beats. Complex pro sounds worse, and beats or tones don't help much either.
I'm hoping someone can give me some ideas here. Maybe the way that I export the songs from the original Ableton projects has something to do with it? I'm exporting as mp3s. Perhaps other formats will retain more original sound? Or.... I'm not sure. But I could use some guidance.... pleeease

Do not export as mp3 if quality is important to you. Really, don't use compressed audio at all if quality is important to you.

Export as WAV or AIFF.

Complex and Complex Pro can do some weird things to the EQ and amplitude of the resulting sound. It’s meant to retain pitch of a sample while time stretching it with some formant options. Unfortunately, doing this and maintaining a smooth character which is great for psychoacoustics also results in inconsistent output in other aspects.

If you’re exporting Just a kick, you might be able to use Beats depending on whether your kick duration is long, or also whether you’re able to get away with using the Transients warp mode in Beats.

But if it’s a full mixdown, then you have to decide between consistent amplitude / eq, and ‘smooth’ texture. Or somewhere in between.

Also on the topic of MP3. Keep in mind that when Live loads an mp3 into a set, it still renders it as a wav in a Temporary folder. It might do that once, and if the temp folder doesn’t get full it won’t do it too frequently. But if the temp folder gets full regularly, it’ll have to render that file every time you use it.

So in the end, you’re saving storage space a moment at a time, but if you want your set to load more consistently and snappy, you might consider keeping the files as wav, either on disc or even on a flash drive if storage is a problem. Not to mention that mp3 also loses a little in quality (so it’d be rendering a wav of a reduced quality audio file).