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The Dark Side of Live (Ableton) and the goodies



Hi,

I just want to report on my happiness and frustration with using
Ableton Live as my looper host. On the happy side is that I'm finding
Live 8.3 way more CPU efficient than my other two usual host
applications Plogue Bidule and Mainstage. The dark side is that Live
is no good when slaved by MIDI Clock to a hosted looper plugin. This
setup causes regular audio dropouts. That's not fun since I'm a big
fan of "trash-looping" where you instantly delete and rebuild the loop
during a performance, resulting in constant tempo changes. I've done
many tests and it just doesn't work in Live. So I'm now trying to
learn how to adapt to the click and still stay creative with my
looping. But there are other goodies in Live - one important fun
factor is that you can bring in sequencing and set up random scripted
slicing of canned loops playback along with the live looping. And the
option to record multiple channels at 24/48 suits me fine (Bidule can
do that too). Thanks to Max For Live I found a good tuner plugin as
well, which comes in handy with a 12 stringed instrument :-)  and I
have also discovered that Live's own "Amp and Cabinet" plugin sounds
ok for Stick and guitar. Not as good to my ears as the Amp Designer in
Mainstage and not as good as Amplitube 3 but in the recent version
Amplitube 3 tends to crash host applications or render saved documents
corrupt.

Bottom line is I'm happy with Live now.

I'm also fine with saving the wildest sessions for Mainstage.
Mainstage is less CPU efficient but as long as you stay under the red
zone it works flawlessly as a slave, MIDI Clock synced host
application for a looper. You can just trash everything in Mobius and
start a new loop while the music is going and Mainstage smoothly
adapts to the new tempo without an audio glitch while you hear all
delays and termolo stuff slowing/speeding into the new tempo. Very
cool. I will miss that in Live. Live may become my suit-and-tie-job
host app and Mainstage my party-on host ;-))  Nothing bad in that, as
long as you are aware about it.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.perboysen.com
http://www.youtube.com/perboysen