Ableton Forum

So, I was thinking of the fact that a "x10" toggle was added to the LFO's frequency.
I was wondering if I could simply automate/modulate a parameter with an audio signal. Like, plug a signal directly to [live.remote~]. My tests using an Operator Sine as a modulation source to modulate another Operator's frequency show that it's not working properly. I mean, it works, the param gets modulated, the CPU doesn't go crazy, but the "FM" is not as it should be.
I'm not sure what's happening, if the signal is downsampled inside [live.remote~] or whatever.

I was kind of expecting that it wouldn't be reliable, but I'd be curious to know more about it, technically.

also wondering when audio rate modulation will finally be implement throughout, which will honestly make the use of my modular rig decisively less attractive. in the meantime i use the free m4l "audio rate automation".

stripou wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 14, 2024 10:45 pm

also wondering when audio rate modulation will finally be implement throughout, which will honestly make the use of my modular rig decisively less attractive. in the meantime i use the free m4l "audio rate automation".

Thanks for the answer, although my point was not to make a feature request, or to ask, "how to do this in m4l ?". It was more "why isn't it working properly ?".

Using audio signals to modulate parameters can sometimes be a bit finicky. It seems like you're running into some unexpected results with the FM modulation when using [live.remote~]. It's possible that there's some processing happening behind the scenes that's affecting how the modulation works.

Have you tried experimenting with different modulation devices or plugins? Sometimes using something specifically designed for audio-rate modulation can give you better results without those strange artifacts.

Also, diving into the technical documentation or checking out forums for your software or hardware might uncover some helpful tips or settings tweaks that could make a difference.

In my experience, sending data too quickly (but no faster than MIDI events) through live.remote~ causes it to "choke" i.e. not send all the data that was sent. My live.remote~ has Normalize set to "off" and Smoothing set to 0. In this thread, there is some discussion about the choke point possibly being the target live.dial and NOT live.remote~.

To work around this, I attempted to do bit packing (store my data in a big float and use bit operations to extract it), but I found this bug with live.remote~ where it does not always accurately output floats it receives. I have reported that bug to support. To stop the choking, I slowed my data down with a [zl queue] object, but I had to slow it down so much that it was not useful for my case.