Re: live looping with ableton live

[Mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 4:17 PM +0200 7/4/07, nico spahni wrote:
>
>My current looping setup includes SL and Augustus Loop hosted in RAX 
>(plus a number of quirky plugins) and controlled via FCB1010. I 
>guess I should add that I mainly loop myself and can't do too much 
>knob tweaking because I need to pluck a string every now and then 
>:-).
>
>What additional benefits would the combination SL, Augustus Loop and 
>Live have in stall for me?

Nico,

Last year, I did an A/B comparison between both Live (version 5) and 
Rax (whatever the final version was before Plasq stopped producing 
it) as a host.  I keep looking for a more streamlined, pared-down 
host than Ableton (I don't use nearly all its functions), but keep 
getting dragged back to it again and again.

I stuck with Live over Rax for the following reasons:

CPU usage: believe it or not, Live is actually more CPU efficient 
than Rax (by about 5-10% on average, in a Powerbook G4 1.67MHz). 
This is based on loading the same VST/AU's into each host, in a 
similar configuration.  Even without Rax's visualizer running, Live 
was generally easier on the CPU, even though its more feature-laden.

Support for Multi-Output Interfaces: At the time, I was doing a lot 
of effect loops out the spare interface jacks to/from external 
hardware.  Always had a problem with getting Rax proprely configured 
there.

Routing: Very few pieces of software have as flexible a routing 
scheme as Live.  There's no problem with patching any source or 
effect into any other source or effect on the fly, even doing splits 
and submixes or send/insert effect chains.

Now, one thing I don't remember testing on Rax was whether it had the 
slave-sync idiosyncrasies that plague Live, so that could be a point 
in Rax's favor.

Finally, I went back over to Live before Plasq discontinued it so I 
don't remember for certain, but did they ever put out a Universal 
Binary version of Rax?  I was thinking that they might have ceased 
development before a UB version was released.

        --m.
-- 
_____
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