Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Electronic Music Production // Dark Arts
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chocstclair85
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Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by chocstclair85 »

Howdy

If any of the Ableton Live boffins could give me some advice on this rendering issue that would be fantastic. I've been using Live for about 2 years and used to just bounce down an entire tune and send it off to mastering which worked fine at the time.

I've now learned a lot since then and prefer to do my post production work in Logic. I'm bouncing down each individual track from Ableton using standard settings: 44100 sample rate / 24bit, Normalize off and no dither.

Putting the individual wavs into Logic and the waveforms are barley visible and makes the post production stuff nearly impossible.

Is there anything i'm doing wrong with the rendering in Ableton? I'm going to try bopuncing down the tracks with normalize on to see if the amplitude stays the same but seen in a lotmof forums that normalize is a bad idea.

Any help would be seriously awesome.

Scott :)

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ARiFF
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by ARiFF »

Hey Chocstclair85, i dont have Logic to test this out, but i found that Ableton's preferences can get quite messed up after a while. I dont know if it has anything to do with it, but it doesnt hurt trying. You can just rename or delete the preferences.cfg file and bounce your tracks again, see what they look like if its fixed or not. For Mac you can find it in /Users/Library/Preferences/Ableton/ ( found that path online, i dont have a mac either )

I just bounced some audio tracks myself just to test, and when i opened them in Soundforge they look fine, all volume levels seem to be the same.

chocstclair85
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by chocstclair85 »

Thanks mate I appreciate the response, i'll give your suggestion a go and let you know how it went. I love Live in a lot of ways but it is so frustrating in other ways.

Cheers pal

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ARiFF
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by ARiFF »

You're welcome m8, same here to be honest : but its starting to become a love / hate relationship hehe...

They need to come up with Live 9 soonish ! Give me some decent automation curves plz amongst a long list of other things they need to take care of...

Faust
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by Faust »

Hi, there is a rather simple solution in Logic - See in the bottom right hand corner of Logic where the bars/sliders for zooming in and out are. To the immediate left of the bar for horizontal zoom is a little sound-wave icon. click and hold this and a slider pops up to make your wave form bigger or smaller... Job done! :)

Normalising's not the best idea - Tracks that peak near 0dBfs are more likely to clip internally within your plug-ins (EQs, compressors and etc) when processing, making gain staging and mixing more of a pain.

chocstclair85
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by chocstclair85 »

Hey mate thanks for your response.

Yeah I see that in Logic, the main issue is the files I am bouncing out of Ableton. For example, I write an full track in Ableton, export "all tracks" and put them on my desktop. Import them into Logic to find that yes the waveform is really small, and barely audible. I know it is easy enough to boost the stems in volume in Logic but doing this fucks up all the levels I set up for each track in Live. I think the real issue is the audio being compressed down during the rendering process in Live. Might just have to start doing everything in Live from now on.

Ableton is so great in some areas and so shit in others. You are spot on about normalising, researched that a bit more and its not an option haha.

Thanks

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melville
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by melville »

Can you send me an ableton project that's having this issue? I'll have a look and see what's going on. There is no reason for the issue you have with "normal" settings. Somewhere in the process, as you describe it, it's being attenuated. I'm not sure how this can be happening. I've been using Live alongside Logic since version 1.5 and tech for a lot of touring bands who use Live extensively, so I'm pretty experienced with both applications. PM me a file transfer link and I'll gladly have a look into it. Somethings going on that shouldn't be and this would be a faster way to get to the bottom of it than going back and forth on the forum, obviously I'll post up my findings to keep any info found on here for all to see. Let me know, the offers there if you want it.

chocstclair85
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by chocstclair85 »

Thanks Melville i'll send you the project tonight when i'm home from work. Thanks heaps!

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sounds_echoed
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by sounds_echoed »

In theory I'd love to be able to arrange in one platform and do post production in another but I can't afford to buy Ableton and Logic.
http://sounds-echoed.tumblr.com/ - house and techno aficionado. vinyl enthusiast.

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ozias_leduc
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Re: Ableton Live rendering is making me sad

Post by ozias_leduc »

i have pro tools aswell as ableton (for work) , and despite always "meaning" to mixdown a track in PT, i never have.

tbh i'm fine inside the box with ableton - and once i have everything the way i want it (which involves a lot of bussing) i don't really want to have to recreate that in protools - hell - if i'm just mixing down a couple of stems, it hardly seems worth it.


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