Ableton Forum

Hi. Been getting to grips with Live 5 for the last few days but have hit a problem I'm baffled about, and hope it's something easily explained. I've dragged a full track into the session view, warped it correctly (it plays in time with the metronome throughout), and I want to pull 2-bar loops of it into new clips for throwing over other tracks. For some reason, 2 of the 5 clips that I've created have a start marker within the loop braces, at a position that isn't the start of the loop. When triggering the loop, the loop begins at this odd start position thus being all out of time. I've tried dragging the start positon marker to the correct position, hitting save, and exactly the same anomaly appears when I drag the clip back into session view from the browser. Setting the Global Quantise to 1 bar, 16th's, None....doesn't change a thing. The other 3 2-bar samples I've taken from this song loop, and start, perfectly.

Clip 1 Start -18 1 <------Note: No number - it's blank
End 128 1 3
Loop Position -19 1 3
Length 2 0 0

Dragging the Start Marker to -19 1 3 lets it play in time, but the Set button next to start is always greyed out.

Any help greatly appreciated. Been stuck on this for 2 nights now.

Thought I had this down, but now it's just making no damn sense. I copied the full track over to the arrangement window, and cut it into about 7 2-bar loops. Ctrl-A and dragged all the new clips to the Session window. Dragged each of the ones I liked to the browser to save. Restarted Ableton, and dragged one of my clips to a new a track in Session View. The start and end points are still there where I had it looped, but the loop braces are at the very left of the clip, and the loop button is not lit. If I drag the loop braces back to where they should be around my 2 bar loop, and hit loop, all is well. If I hit save now, and start over again, the damn loop braces are back at the beginning of the clip. If I drag the loop braces back yet again, check the start point in the clip is 1 1 1, and the end is 3 1 1, hit the loop button, check the loop position is set to 1 1 1, with a length of 2 0 0, all is well, As soon as I save it, and then reload, the fecking loop is gone again.

What the hell am I doing wrong? This is driving me nuts.

Right. Well it was me hitting the save button in the clip view that was the problem. If I've looped a section of a sample, and there's a save button to the left of it, I'd guess that it was going to save the contents of the loop, seeing as how every other visual indicator is suggesting that that would be the case. Not so.

Not helping noobs is letting the terrorists win. Hold my hand - please.

Select the region, option drag it to a new audio track (drag the clip first and then hold down the option key) and consolidate (control J (PC) command J (MAC)) or...

With multiple tracks as the source, it's useful to just make a new audio track with the input set to resample. In the arrange window, select the 2-bar range, edit>loop selection (control L (PC) command L (MAC)), turn off the loop, turn on the punch out key, set the record button in the new track and in the top bar, and hit the space bar. This records the loop on the other track. If you've got other tracks you don't want you just solo the track or tracks your interested in and these will be recorded on the new track. Now, you have a loop that is clean.

You could also render the section to disk. Or you could seperate the region (control E/command E) and consolidate the clip at its current position in the track.

When you drag the new 2-bar file into your arrange window, you can make other adjustments to the warp, and your loop markers and start and end points will be limited to the little region in the now smaller file which is easier to manage.