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Re: 1st Loop Workaround in Ableton's LIVE 4.0

> > I can't give an articulate defense, Per, but  someone once explained
> > to me
> > why it is a much more difficult thing
> > to accomplish '1st loop capability' in a VST plugin that has to work
> > inside
> > of a host program.
>
> You're probably right about that (I have no programming skills either).
> But Live IS a host application, not a VST plug-in. Let's see what they
> crammed into L4! The online looping community will once again be
> cooking with all kinds of workaround hints ;-)

Maybe this can shed some light on the situation. ;)

A VST-plugin cannot do first loop since the VST-standard doesn't support
slaving a Host to a Plugin, at the moment it's only possible to slave a
Plugin to the Host. Maybe with some nifty hacking and coding-skills it 
would
be possible to do a midi-hack in the plugin that enables it to Send
midi-tempo out and then use something like Hubi's Midi-loopback to slave 
the
Host to that midi-data.

Which leads to the fundamental problem of the "First loop"-function. To
calculate the tempo of First loop, as far as i know, you first have to set
how long the loop is in meassures instead of tempo. That is, if the first
loop is 1/4 long and the first loop recorded is 2 seconds long then we have
4 beats on 2 seconds resulting in 120 bpm, if we instead record a loop that
is 1 second long then we have the same amount of meassures but in a shorter
time thus doubling the tempo.

And the problem is that the Ableton Live time-stretch engine is 
tempo-based,
that is, it takes the current tempo and "lock" the recorded sample to that
tempo and then use that as a base for the realtime time-stretching
calculations.

So based on this it's virtually impossible to include a first loop function
into Live unless they rewrite the whole sample-engine. OR just add a
separate FirstLoop function that can be turned on instead of the
Tap-function.

On another note:
I'm having trouble (financial problems) getting hold of a Mac so I can
compile my VST-LiveLooping plugin so my plan for now is to start
beta-testing on PC for the moment and only do release-compiles for the Mac
later on. So anyone who's interested in Beta-testing the plugin can 
register
at http://www.condomo.com/4um

/Tias