Ableton is everywhere...

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It's excellent workflow, speed and flexibility come into play when you stop treating it like other (tape-style) DAWs and play to its strengths, on its own terms.

Racks for example are a massive time saver, especially when used with Push. For example, I saved custom racks for all of my most used synths and effects, with the most sensible/commonly used parameters mapped to macros, so whenever I load them up I have instant, native hands on control right out of the gate.

Parallel processing via racks is second to none, except for Bitwig. Let's say you want to add a delay to a channel, with frequency shifting of the wet signal only and then split mixed signal into high and low for further processing with distortion. In Live you can set all of this up with a fully self-contained insert-style workflow, that can be saved as a rack for future use, with all kinds of parameters mapped to macros for easy/creative hands on control. Setting up the routing alone for this scenario in most other DAWs, would be a workflow, creativity sucking nightmare, relatively speaking, and that's before you've even considered how you might easily handle any automation spread over the many sends and returns or saving for easy recall into another project.

If you're coming from a linear, tape-style DAW then it's easy to overlook session view and in particular follow actions. Clever use of the follow action logic allows you to create (generative/semi) sequences, variations, fills etc very quickly. For example you could have 5 loops, 1 main and 4 fills and program the logic such that the main loop plays for 7 bars, then triggers any other loop i.e. a fill loop, for 1 bar and then jumps back to the main loop to repeat the sequence over. Aside from Bitwig, I'm not aware of any other DAW offering such a workflow and trying to simulate this, would be prohibitively expensive in terms of time vs results or simply impossible.

Live is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and I for one, would definitely like to see universal QoL additions like bounce-in-place added sooner rather than later, but what it does, it does very well and only Bitwig gets anywhere near close (and even surpasses) in certain areas. If these areas are important to your creative process, then only Live will do and it seems they are for a lot of people and that's why it's so popular.
Always Read the Manual!

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DJ Warmonger wrote: Tue Nov 26, 2019 11:58 am
In order to spare CPU, instruments must be bounced in audio waves and you loose the ability to change instruments parameters on the fly so live act is too static.
...and how is that exclusive to Live, anyway? Which DAW allows you to save CPU without bouncing to audio? :P
because Live is supposed to play live which other DAWs (but Bitwig) don't, and once the vst are bounced you can't tweak their parameters.
There is not an issue when you are in the studio.

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PieBerger wrote: Tue Nov 26, 2019 12:21 pm It's excellent workflow, speed and flexibility come into play when you stop treating it like other (tape-style) DAWs and play to its strengths, on its own terms.
Amen. Absolutely the best way of putting it I've heard. Took me several years swimming against the current to figure that out.

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dupont wrote: Tue Nov 26, 2019 11:46 am I also find live sucks for live act, like MPC.
In order to spare CPU, instruments must be bounced in audio waves and you loose the ability to change instruments parameters on the fly so live act is too static.
Live is good for playing ready prepared professional sounding loops but is a headacke if you want to build a live act from scratch with instruments.
Stuff like Reaper's predictive rendering doesn't work real-time, since it uses a buffer that adds to the overall latency (if it is set to 50 ms, then it adds 50 ms of latency), in addition to the audio driver buffer latency, plugin latency, etc.

If you play notes and change parameters on the fly, either the buffer is disabled and CPU usage is going to be identical to Live (since it is not really Live's or Reaper's, but the VST's internal CPU usage, the host doesn't affect that), or the buffer stays enabled and changes will lag for the buffer's length.

But point is, Ableton Live doesn't "suck for live act", people know that.

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Giuseppe Ottaviani using midi keyboard and pre rendered clip on the stage so basically he is bravely using Live and vst in his petrormance. Maybe he has backup clip for fail safe.

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tooneba wrote: Wed Nov 27, 2019 12:03 am Giuseppe Ottaviani using midi keyboard and pre rendered clip on the stage so basically he is bravely using Live and vst in his petrormance. Maybe he has backup clip for fail safe.
I red an article yesterday on keyboard mag, a musicians group used 2 macbook pros with Ableton on stage (+ 2 other macbook pros for mainstage).
Both macbooks with Ableton had the same settings and played in sync and one is here only to help if the other crashes.
That's a lot of money !

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dupont wrote: Thu Nov 28, 2019 8:47 am
tooneba wrote: Wed Nov 27, 2019 12:03 am Giuseppe Ottaviani using midi keyboard and pre rendered clip on the stage so basically he is bravely using Live and vst in his petrormance. Maybe he has backup clip for fail safe.
I red an article yesterday on keyboard mag, a musicians group used 2 macbook pros with Ableton on stage (+ 2 other macbook pros for mainstage).
Both macbooks with Ableton had the same settings and played in sync and one is here only to help if the other crashes.
That's a lot of money !
A redundant system, with automatic switchover, isn’t too crazy expensive any more. The laptops don’t have to be purchased new. Ableton could be running light show, playing backing track, and triggering words/videos on screens.

https://youtu.be/CdT9Pk_ASuw

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Ableton is everywhere, but I can't figure it out!.........Honestly, it's a MESS!!!!!!!!!!!!

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HitEmTrue wrote: Fri Nov 29, 2019 2:22 pm
dupont wrote: Thu Nov 28, 2019 8:47 am
tooneba wrote: Wed Nov 27, 2019 12:03 am Giuseppe Ottaviani using midi keyboard and pre rendered clip on the stage so basically he is bravely using Live and vst in his petrormance. Maybe he has backup clip for fail safe.
I red an article yesterday on keyboard mag, a musicians group used 2 macbook pros with Ableton on stage (+ 2 other macbook pros for mainstage).
Both macbooks with Ableton had the same settings and played in sync and one is here only to help if the other crashes.
That's a lot of money !
A redundant system, with automatic switchover, isn’t too crazy expensive any more. The laptops don’t have to be purchased new. Ableton could be running light show, playing backing track, and triggering words/videos on screens.

https://youtu.be/CdT9Pk_ASuw
This could be a solution for a simple song arrangement but if you have to switch on the fly between several songs organized in tracks in the session view with several plugins.
It becomes a mess to deals with 2 laptops at the same time.
Another case is that if you sync 2 laptops running live in order to switch from on track to the other, so if you want a safe setup, you must secure your setup with 4 laptops :dog:

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reggie1979 wrote: Sat Nov 30, 2019 5:59 am Ableton is everywhere, but I can't figure it out!.........Honestly, it's a MESS!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's also my feeling, so many possibilities that I always lost time to find a way to do something and scratching my head is not good for my workflow.
Perhaps this is why we can find tutorials everywhere to help musicians try to understand.

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It’s definitely different, so it takes a while to get over the hump. Especially if you’re used to other DAWs. I’ll just leave it at that.

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Ableton might be crap for all I know (and I have quite a few issues with it), but I'm using it simply because it was ridiculously easy to get the hang of compared to Pro Tools.

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dupont wrote: Sat Nov 30, 2019 9:51 am
reggie1979 wrote: Sat Nov 30, 2019 5:59 am Ableton is everywhere, but I can't figure it out!.........Honestly, it's a MESS!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's also my feeling, so many possibilities that I always lost time to find a way to do something and scratching my head is not good for my workflow.
Perhaps this is why we can find tutorials everywhere to help musicians try to understand.
Seriously, I tried Live Lite recently, and despite it being a very good program for nothing, I was in shock! And looking stuff up on the internet is even MORE confusing.

Can't believe this was my Riker years ago, it's a mess!

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As a few people have mentioned, where Ableton shines from a sound design and mixing perspective is when you have large numbers of inserts and multiple VIs working together as one instrument/setup. It allows you to manage that really well with groups and racks and stuff. I can do all of the same stuff in Studio One but it’s just simpler in Ableton for most people if they aren’t married to a particular workflow out of years of experience.

For vocal tracking, editing, and what I call mixing workflow (quickly copying/deleting/managing inserts, working with automation, playlists, mixer scenes and snapshots, versioning) it is pretty clunky.

So honestly I think it excels because it perfectly suits how many kinds of music are produced. Quickly compose, quickly and heavily layer instruments and effects to create your track, do a rough mix, then export it to a mix engineer who will mix it fast and efficiently (more easily done in a traditional DAW imo)

Not my taste but it works really well for that I think. That’s probably a big reason why it caught on.

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It seems bass ackward to me these days. I remember the day where I happily busked through all the hurdles, thinking I was some superman. But In the days that have followed recently, I've come to be embarrassed as to how difficult it is to make a simple beat. Seems in yesteryear it wasn't that hard. But now it seems awful and way worse than "looping" a part in Reason or S1!

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