Ableton Forum

LIVE from a Pro-DJ perspective.

Ok, so a couple of months ago I thought I'd cracked it. Brand new laptop, an external 250gb USB harddrive where all my audio and projects would reside so that I could seamlessly move from my desktop to the laptop.

I'd finished warping 100s of 320kbps MP3s, bought legitimately from download sites, many of which I'd bought to replace tracks I already own on vinyl.

Time to try this out in the club. I'm doing a warmup set - great, I'd be foolish to do my 1st test in a main set. I arriive at the club early, plug everything in and I load my empty DJing template and start to load clips for my set. MP3s start to get re-analysed (ok, I guess thats obvious, they don't exist in the laptops decoding cache) BUT what's this? All the warp markers for the MP3s have shifted again - it looks like the offset you get when you autowarp an MP3 (which I have longtime assumed to be a longstanding bug).

Dejected, I pack up my laptop and return to my trusty CDs and Vinyl for my set. I try to forget about my disappointment and hope that this will be fixed in 5.2.

I've done some experimentation under 5.2 this morning. My WAVs are still warped fine, but a lot of my MP3s? Nope - all my carefully placed warp markers are shifted away from the down beat.

I've also tried loading a brand new MP3 to see if LIVE 5.2 puts the 1st warpmarker on the first downbeat - NOPE the offset is still there, taking the "Auto" out of Autowarp, sorry Abes but I can't understand why you haven't prioritised fixing this annoying bug. I'm sure the two behaviours I'm referring to in this post are connected.

Can anyone help me with this? I'm seriously considering binning all my MP3s and converting to WAVs, but this will mean rewarping the tracks again(arggggh!)

I love Ableton Live, I use it all the time for producing (for professional release I hasten to add). But as a tool for DJing (with the much fanfared MP3 feature - my reason for upgrading to LIVE 5 in the first place) I'm finding it difficult to take seriously.

warp a track then press the save button the sample fixed
glad to be such a great help
name your first born after me

one more suggestion, next time try 2 warmup sets 3+ however would be even more desirable

Thank you for your sarcasm Mr Huck.

I have used the save button when warping every one of my tracks. It goes without saying I have practised at home. I am describing behaviour I genuinely believe to be bugs.

I'd still welcome your help though (without the sarcasm this time). If you have not had any problems with Live, could you tell me a bit more about your setup, whether you use MP3s and so on. Am I the only one having problems when DJing with MP3s?

I have this problem of memory greed with Live 5 I didn't have with live 4 with the same DJ set : if only I could widen the tracks in Live 4 so that I could read their name, I wouldn't have touched 5 for DJ sets.

As for the mp3s, as they're converted by Live and you might lose them, there's no advantage in NOT converting them in WAV.
I agree that mp3 playing is useless in live.

sorry but i could read if you are just hitting autowarp then save or do you actually drag the 1st marker to the 1st beat - auto is handy but doesnt do it all

Yeah, I appreciate Autowarp doesn't do it all, but it gets frustratingly close.

I've been warping a lot of disco today, which requires warp markers every bar or so, but when warping modern dance music haven't you found that theres an offset before the first beat, and if you get the first beat right you then have to compensate the rest of the track by approx the same amount. The process being (at it's most simple):

1 Load MP3
2 Move 1.1.1 warp marker to first downbeat
3 Zoom to end of track
4 Adjust the autowarp so that the warp markers are still in time
5 Save the settings for the Clip

I've warped literally 1000s of tracks in my years of using LIVE but it seems to me that the offset at stage 4 is very similar to that in stage 2.There must be a relationship...

This aside - the main point of my post is once I've done all this work (it doesn't take long per track agreed, but this x1000 is a long time) I can't seem to rely on LIVE not to forget the warp settings for an MP3. All the warp markers are still there- for example if I've manually added extra markers when a track changes time, but the offset seems to reappear.

Unless anyone can convince me otherwise, I think its time to convert all my MP3s to WAVs and start the whole warping procedure again. Not something I'm going to enjoy but at least I'll be able to rely on the tracks being in time when I load them.

keeko i have not had this problem sorry about the sarcasm. it is in my nature. i will warp a track, save track settings and that is that. i use mostly mp3s. i hate to hear that you are having that problem

Hi keeko,
the bug you encounter was fixed in the beta phase, there was a problem when loading more then 6 320kB mp3´s into Live at once.
The problem is that all the tracks you warped in Live 5.0.3 (I guess) and saved in this version "have" the bug.
So you need to click any warpmarker now, hit ctrl+a and move all the markers at once to the right pos. Then save the the new clipsettings.
It´s the easiest workaround, a bit of work but should do the trick.
Have fun on saving

Greetings

sorry to hear about your problem - i have warped hundreds of track including mp3s and never had this problem - I never rely on the autowarp feature. I manually warp every track and do it in less than a minute - heres how i do it.

I find the first downbeat: set as 1:1:1
then i select: warp from here straight
then since most edm follows the same structure i place a warp marker every 16 measures or so. I usually place a warp marker at bar 17,33,49,65 and so on.

This has always worked for me and have never had a problem.

I recommend using only wav files. I wasted WAY TO MUCH TIME warping hundreds of tracks only to find that moving them around from place to place, e.g. external HDD's and what not caused all kinds of problems. I converted them all to waves and all my problems went away. I don’t trust the mp3 features in live outside of goofing around at home. They are in no way ready for "pro" as far as I am concerned. I have put it behind me for now but it is quite lame that this feature is still advertized as working when it clearly is not working in a trustworthy fashion.

Thanks for all the replies, the general consensus is leading me towards converting my MP3s to WAVs.

The CTRL A tip to move all warp markers is a good one - I didn't know you could do that! Thanks. This will save me a lot of time warping (WAVs or MP3s)

this http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36534 has fixed the warp markers moving problem for me in 5.0.3 so far.

doh! didnt see that was with the actual 5.2 release.

that is a problem.....

yeah, since LIve has to convert your Mp3s anyway, there's no benefit to having them in mp3 format.
first thing i do when i buy an mp3 is to convert it to wav.