Ableton Forum

I starting doing racks of all of my third-party plugins (NI, Univ Audio, etc.), for organizational purposes. Does the rack maintain the quality of the audio? And does it add any significant CPU?

This project was initiated because of a doubled amount of plugins caused by Automap when I got a Remote SL and sifting the plugins has become awkward.

Probably will add a tiny amount of CPU. Shouldn't in any way alter the sound.

Careful though - racks within racks within racks make for VERY slow-loading sets. Some of the more brilliant-but-complicated trackteam setups take ages to load because of very intricate racks-within-racks setups.

anytime you have ANY doubt about signal quality, test it yourself.

take a loop, run it through the process in question and record the output.
put a utility plug in on the recorded version and hit the Phz-L and Phz-R (these invert the signal) buttons. get their outputs to the same volume, as close as you can get. anything you hear is the difference between the two, if they cancel there is no difference. try it with a clip without effecting it, you'll hear nothing at the output when the clip is played with an inverted copy of itself, pretty cool.

it's good to run tests, we can find flaws in Live and learn along the way.

Nebulae answered the question though.

cool - thanks!

Tone Deft wrote:anytime you have ANY doubt about signal quality, test it yourself.

take a loop, run it through the process in question and record the output.
put a utility plug in on the recorded version and hit the Phz-L and Phz-R (these invert the signal) buttons. get their outputs to the same volume, as close as you can get. anything you hear is the difference between the two, if they cancel there is no difference. try it with a clip without effecting it, you'll hear nothing at the output when the clip is played with an inverted copy of itself, pretty cool.

it's good to run tests, we can find flaws in Live and learn along the way.

Nebulae answered the question though.

If you have run something through a process of course its going to sound different?

Or do you mean run it through the rack "dry" and see if the dry track is different?

Sound Quality: If the volume of a rack chain is untouched at 0.00 dB it should be transparent audiowise and not alter the signal at all.

CPU: Average load should not increase significantly. There is a bit of additional math for the mixer in each rack but this is not too expensive. However, racks make it very easy to create huge things...

A rack chain that does not produce audio, e.g. because the chain selector or the key or velocity zone does not send audio/ MIDI and the sound comming from this chain has decayed completly, such a chain does not need CPU.

However, lots of racks in racks in racks will create significant spikes in CPU load when triggering clips with envelopes or lots of parametes assigned to MIDI controlers. ( reason: Live needs to iterate thru a lot of internal lists to check if anything has changed and needs to be updated inside a rack ) We allready worked on reducing this and will improve further in future releases.

Load time: racks are complex structures and make a document quite big. A lot of calculations and re-routing of data / audio is need to be done internally to ensure racks do the right things. After all it is like having a giant patch bay in each track....and potentially a giant patch bay within this patch bay...

But we work on solutions here too, which will significantly reduce load time and memory comsumption in future versions of Live.


Cheers, Robert

Lessons in PR: How to talk about Live 7 without actually mentioning Live 7:

Robert Henke wrote:We allready worked on reducing this and will improve further in future releases.

...

But we work on solutions here too, which will significantly reduce load time and memory comsumption in future versions of Live.

compositeone wrote:

Tone Deft wrote:anytime you have ANY doubt about signal quality, test it yourself.

it's good to run tests, we can find flaws in Live and learn along the way.

If you have run something through a process of course its going to sound different?

Or do you mean run it through the rack "dry" and see if the dry track is different?

like your second response.

take a loop
run it through a process
record the output of the process
put the recorded copy next to the original
put an inverted utility on ONE of the clips
hit play

if the clips are identical, you will hear nothing at the output
signal + (-signal) = 0
they have to be at identical volume levels.

try it with a subtle reverb, the main signal will be removed but the echoes after will remain.

it's a REALLY easy test to do and can show a lot, put all these things that we say we can hear into perspective.

does pdc still work in racks?




.lm.

nebulae wrote:Careful though - racks within racks within racks make for VERY slow-loading sets. Some of the more brilliant-but-complicated trackteam setups take ages to load because of very intricate racks-within-racks setups.

When Racks first showed up. It was like "lets see how far we can push these things, and make some crazy devices." So, with some of the first gen trackteam rack devices youll get some longer Load times but with that you get some really intense and flexible sound mangling capabilities. Lately we have been rigorously testing and streamlining each new Rack Device and seeing what we can remove here or swap there in order to get quick load times yet still keep the Flexibility. In the Last couple of collections, Orbiter Synth and TerraGroove, all racks are expandable. For Instance, with the "Manifold" rack, we have created a macro shell to which you can load up as many instances of the manifold perc rack as you would like. So basically you can start off with an 8 hit drum rack to which you can drag in 8 more hits, then another 8, and so on...Im actually posting a video lesson about expanding one of the rack devices soon.

Great news, Mike. And I've definitely noticed a much speedier response with the newer Livefills, so excellent work there.

nebulae wrote:Lessons in PR: How to talk about Live 7 without actually mentioning Live 7:

leisuremuffin wrote:does pdc still work in racks?

.lm.

this is how it is supposed to be.

R.

what is pdc?