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

["Tias" <tias@condomo.com>]

> With all deference to your greater expertise, I don't believe this is
> true. Perhaps I misunderstand what you are explaining,

Indeed you must have missunderstood. Let's say you have a sample of a
quitar-accord that is 2 seconds long. How do you decide what tempo that
sample is? It could be 1 BPM or it could be 100 BPM.

There's no tempo reference in the sample what so ever, so to be able to
calculate a tempo you simply have to decide what base in meassures you are
working in (this is what you do in the EDP). So you say: "Ok, my chosen
tempo-base for the first thing i record is 1 beat long." - This results in
the tempo for the sample beeing 1 beat in 2 seconds and the resulting tempo
beeing 30 BPM.

Now instead, this is what Live does when you record a new sample. It
allready have the Tempo (for example, 120 bpm) and then it sets the newly
recorded Unstretched sample to 120 bpm. Then if you decide to change the
tempo to 60bpm, Live pretty much calculates that it has to chop up the
sample is little bits (grains) and then play each bit 2 times over, thus
giving you a timestretched sample with that Chopped up effect sometimes.

The timestretching method is called Timestretching by Granular Synthesis 
and
that is indeed based on sample-length in the Tempo-domain and not the
Time-domain.

> Live has the ability to defeat the time-stretching functionality on any
> sample. So having the software extract the tempo from the object length
> on a non-timestretched sample should actually be a relatively simple
> task. This is a one-click operation in Logic, a drag and drop in Kyma,
> and a two footswitch press on the Adrenalinn.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -- Sarth
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Tias [mailto:tias@condomo.com]
> > Sent: Monday, June 07, 2004 5:35 AM
> > To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
> > Subject: 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
> >
> >
>
>