Better Warping like Logic 'Smart Tempo" ?

[buckman]

I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to warp older tracks in Ableton Live, especially 60s and 70s funk, soul, and disco, and I keep running into the same issue.

Anything that wasn’t recorded to a click, so tracks with natural tempo drift, can take quite a while to warp properly. Live’s warping is solid, but getting a full track sitting tightly to a consistent BPM usually means placing multiple warp markers and going through it section by section. It works, but it’s slow and a bit of a grind if you’re preparing a lot of music for DJ style mixing.

What I’ve noticed is that other tools seem to handle this type of material more automatically now. Logic Pro’s Smart Tempo, for example, can analyse and conform a track to a steady BPM surprisingly well, and even DJ software like djay Pro can keep things locked in time during playback.

So I’m curious how people here are approaching this in Live.

Given Ableton’s reputation as a leader in warping and its role as both a production and live performance tool, I’m curious if there are any plans to improve automatic warping to this level. Ideally, it would be great to see a system that can intelligently analyse and quantize full tracks to a consistent tempo with minimal or no manual intervention.

[pottering]

Seems your complaint is more about automatic Audio Quantization rather than automatic Warping.

By your description seems Logic and DJ software may auto-quantize as part of their Warp-equivalent functions.

But in Live, Warping and Quantization are separate things.

Live can auto-warp loaded audio, but it does not automatically quantize the resulting warped audio.

Gotta quantize (ctrl+U or ctrl+shift+U) after Live auto-warps.

Yeah, it is an extra step, that could have a automatic toggle option in the settings.