Re: looping with albeton live

[Zoe Keating <info@zoekeating.com>]

yes, i have. but only a little. i had a few problems with it.

- the first is latency. with just 4 loopers going i experienced  
significant audio latency and couldn't seem to get it down to  
negligible. i'm sure must be doing something wrong, but i conquered  
latency issues with my sooperlooper/ableton setup and it works great.  
i'm not wanting to spend a lot of time redoing my setup right now, but  
i will certainly try again later.

- next, multiple loops. if you have a bunch of these things at  
once...well how do you SEE them all? i couldn't figure this one out.  
if you know, do tell me how to make them float on top of the Ableton  
interface so i can see them all at once. maybe i'm missing some key  
piece of data?

- multi function transport buttons are not my favorite. lots of room  
for error when you're controlling many loopers. yes sooperlooper uses  
them too, but you can also send very specific midi messages (for  
example loop1 mute_off or loop1 mute_on) in addition to toggle  
messages (loop 1 mute - depends on the state of the loop). i can even  
have one function respond to 2 different midi messages (say, a note on  
CH16 and a program change on CH9). in Ableton everything is a toggle  
which does make it extremely simple, but this trips me up a lot when  
I'm controlling one shot loops in Ableton. sometimes I forget if a  
track is muted or not. i like to be able to fire commands that turn on  
6 loops, regardless of their state, while simultaneously turning off 4  
loops, regardless of their state. its true that sooperlooper is not  
perfect or consistent in its midi control implementation, for example,  
overdub is only accessible as a toggle in sooperlooper, as is record.   
but i REALLY like the way Jesse did the sooperlooper midi bindings.  
they're so flexible. it'll be hard to divorce me from that level of  
control ;-) but....if Ableton were to extend the functionality of the  
Looper to allow the functions to be accessed via midi separate from  
the interface....that would solve it.

- last....OSC. this doesn't affect the looping functionality of either  
looper. but i like that i can get OSC status messages out of  
sooperlooper (record state, loop length, position, etc) and send them  
to another computer that might do something with those messages. the  
OSC implementation of sooperlooper is non-standard, so you need  
something to translate its output...but it does work.

HOWEVER...

i have been using Ableton's looper in my recordings to recreate my  
"live" looping in the studio. that's been great. it was always hard  
for me to record high quality loops, and have them not be "hardcoded".




On Nov 7, 2009, at 11:02 AM, George Ludwig wrote:

> Zoe, have you experimented yet with Live's new looper as a possible  
> replacement for Sooperlooper?