Need help understanding some of the packs by Ableton.

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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spkapust
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 5:23 am

Need help understanding some of the packs by Ableton.

Post by spkapust » Mon Mar 27, 2023 12:55 am

I have multiple Ableton packs and in them are a bunch of samples that are .aif files. Do the .adg sounds utilize the .aifs? If so how can I look at how the .adg is using the .aif? There seems to be no rhyme or reason to these .aif samples. Below are some of the things causing my confusion.

example 1) In Ableton Orchestral String samples, some notes are played multiple times, others only once, and the note order seems pretty random.
example 2) In the Ableton Synth Essentials pack, the samples don't even have all the notes you can play for each instrument.
example 3) One of the Ableton Grand Piano pack samples is piano noises that it doesn't seem like any of the .adg's would be use.
example 4) For Orchestral Strings and Piano, the samples live in a subfolder called Combined. I assume it is called combined because it is putting all the samples together, is that so? What even is the point of this folder, why wouldn't they just live under the samples folder?

scg
Posts: 136
Joined: Sun Feb 12, 2023 10:14 pm

Re: Need help understanding some of the packs by Ableton.

Post by scg » Mon Mar 27, 2023 2:21 am

I may be misunderstanding your question and telling you things you already know, but here's some info, just in case it might be relevant.
If so how can I look at how the .adg is using the .aif?
That depends on the particular rack/instrument. I think in some cases you may not be able to examine or access the details of a rack/instrument if it includes devices you don't own (although I don't have any direct experience with this). Otherwise though, you should be able to expand the device/chain views and see how things work. This is also something I'm not that familiar with, but if you see a Simpler that says 'multisample mode', you may need to choose 'Simpler->Sampler' from its contextual menu to view and access the individual zones. From there, you can see how the samples are used.

There are different ways of organizing a sampler instrument, which explains some of the things you're seeing. Sometimes samples are consolidated into single audio files, in which case each zone will be a small slice of that audio file. Sometimes there's a sample for each note. And sometimes there's one sample for every few notes, with each sample transposed a few times as needed.

I think the piano noise samples you mention are used by the pedal on/off racks.

Again, apologies if I'm misunderstanding and telling you things you already know.

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