** How many people actually MIX songs in Ableton ? **

[fx23]

when it works for your uses, and never felt pbs you don't need to care.

there are several aspect of live that could limit a bit mixing and mastering. pdc and src beeing the two main pb that make it a bit less handy in mixing/mastering tasks than some other daws, ie using a mastering linear phase EQ will reult in automations being out of sync or live could proceed in many cases to unwanted sample rate convertions.
but the fact to be able to do all-in one is less time consumming and more user friendly. and sometimes/often speed and creativity
matters more than technical perfection, but still man should be aware of underlying ptential issues to get the best of it.
it's certainly possible to mix and master in live in most cases. just not the ultimate tool for that, ..in certain cases.

[supamonsta]

I used to mix on ableton live, but I could not finish any track, allways trying new stuff, new arrangement tweaks, new synth patches, new mixdowns, subbusses, extra compression and whatever else...

Now I make something like a "premix" in ableton, then make it final in Harrison Mixbus, which I find really much more straightforward for this task, and, not to say, has a really great natural sound with quite no tweaking, and no plugin needed.

that's indeed a matter of taste, and like lots of user here, I never had serious problems with Live (live 7 here), and it sounds great. Just that I really enjoyed using another software for final mixdown, kinda released me from the stasis I felt with live for my final mixdowns (It allowed me to actually finish tracks that I was working on since ages in ableton, without managing to finalise them...)

IMHO using another software can help you (at least, undecise people like me) to clearly separate the arrangement/composition phase from the mixdown phase, and then get things done.

cheers

[YILA]

I do.

www.myspace.com/alooshmusic
www.myspace.com/yila

[Moody]

It is possible, it sounds like you are using to many resources for your harware. I would probably begin with questioning why I was using so many plugins at the mix stage...

[Angstrom]

IMHO using another software can help you (at least, undecise people like me) to clearly separate the arrangement/composition phase from the mixdown phase, and then get things done.

cheers

interesting idea.
I guess that's one drawback of an "it does everything " app, that you always have the option to do everything to your song, at any stage.

[grooverb]

Reapaers alot of fun and fairly easy to get into in if you have been playing with other stuff, but I'm glad to be back to live, better sound quality IMO.

If you load Reaper up with 100 channels you might still get clicks and pops and stuff, but you can find out. They do a trial so suck it and see, but I think what other people have said is very true about limiting your self. You can freeze tracks in ableton, so you bounce them down from midi to audio and you can do the same in reaper. Saves loads of space/cpu.

also if you're loading up loads of one shot fx on different tracks, you can bung some onto one track and automate the volume.

and stick your reverb and delays on the send channels and route stuff to them. That'll save tons of resources as well.

You can also set sound quality to eco somehwere, adn then bung it up to hi quality for your final mixdown, sorry I can't remember where the toggle is for that.

Apologies if I'm telling you how to suck eggs on any of this btw

[n8tron]

I do. But why should anyone care?

[junqueira]

Thanks for everyone's answers...I will download a trial and see what happens.

[fisto]

Reapaers alot of fun and fairly easy to get into in if you have been playing with other stuff, but I'm glad to be back to live, better sound quality IMO.

If you load Reaper up with 100 channels you might still get clicks and pops and stuff, but you can find out. They do a trial so suck it and see, but I think what other people have said is very true about limiting your self. You can freeze tracks in ableton, so you bounce them down from midi to audio and you can do the same in reaper. Saves loads of space/cpu.

also if you're loading up loads of one shot fx on different tracks, you can bung some onto one track and automate the volume.

and stick your reverb and delays on the send channels and route stuff to them. That'll save tons of resources as well.

You can also set sound quality to eco somehwere, adn then bung it up to hi quality for your final mixdown, sorry I can't remember where the toggle is for that.

Apologies if I'm telling you how to suck eggs on any of this btw

Wrong settings are the reason for your clicks & pops. I have none !
In reaper you can really mess up the performance with wrong settings and there are quite a few !
So just wanted to ad that it is not reapers fault. It's user error.

[swishniak]

I mix in Live, but pretty much because it's the only DAW I have easy immediate access to.

download reaper:

http://www.reaper.fm/

its basically free

Sorry , but it's definetely not free. It's 50 €, so almost free compared to the functionality. Please support the devs if you use Reaper because it's the most amazing DAW with a great forum and very helpful people there.
It's more for the grown up engineers and advanced DAW users.

I hope that not to much Live-kiddies jump to reaper as this would fill the forum with stupid questions etc...

If you're a "i play around with live cause it's so much fun!"-type of guy, please stay with Live.

But if you are really serious about your mixes and want to "build" your own daw then please, check out reaper.
You won't believe how great and efficient it works until you dive in deep!
<--

im with you, fisto. . i didnt mean you shouldnt support them; but 50 bucks for a fully functional DAW is REALLY cheap.

i still prefer logic, but have used reaper in situations where engineers recorded with it . its definitely usable.

harrison mixbus seems like an interesting way to go too. hmm.

i wonder how many people on this forum have never had to master protools or logic. . interesting.

[Cezband]

I hope that not to much Live-kiddies jump to reaper as this would fill the forum with stupid questions etc...

If you're a "i play around with live cause it's so much fun!"-type of guy, please stay with Live.

Reaper is great, and when I've got some spare time to invest in learning a new DAW it is at the top of my list - as stated previously, the price/feature ratio is astounding.

Having said that, I think that considering you're (Fisto) trying so hard to be a poster-boy for Reaper you should probably be more wary about the elitist tone of your posts. I hope the irony is not lost on you that considering you're worried about the level of the Reaper forums being lowered, this is the first post I've seen on the Live forum in quite a while which adopts the "Users of a DAW which is not my preferred one are just little kiddies" mindset.

Luckily for me, I don't derive any fun from using Live or making music in general at all so I think by your logic I should be ideally suited to Reaper. Sometimes I write a really badass synth line and I feel the corners of my mouth starting to curl upwards into a smile and I have to quickly stop myself by slamming my hand in the drawer of my desk because after all, making music is Deadly Serious Business.

To summarise, possibly the first thing about Reaper that I've genuinely disliked is the paranoid suspicion that your mindset represents the majority of the Reaper community. I hope very much that I am incorrect.

[fisto]

I hope that not to much Live-kiddies jump to reaper as this would fill the forum with stupid questions etc...

If you're a "i play around with live cause it's so much fun!"-type of guy, please stay with Live.

Reaper is great, and when I've got some spare time to invest in learning a new DAW it is at the top of my list - as stated previously, the price/feature ratio is astounding.

Having said that, I think that considering you're (Fisto) trying so hard to be a poster-boy for Reaper you should probably be more wary about the elitist tone of your posts. I hope the irony is not lost on you that considering you're worried about the level of the Reaper forums being lowered, this is the first post I've seen on the Live forum in quite a while which adopts the "Users of a DAW which is not my preferred one are just little kiddies" mindset.

Luckily for me, I don't derive any fun from using Live or making music in general at all so I think by your logic I should be ideally suited to Reaper. Sometimes I write a really badass synth line and I feel the corners of my mouth starting to curl upwards into a smile and I have to quickly stop myself by slamming my hand in the drawer of my desk because after all, making music is Deadly Serious Business.

To summarise, possibly the first thing about Reaper that I've genuinely disliked is the paranoid suspicion that your mindset represents the majority of the Reaper community. I hope very much that I am incorrect.

Oh, no I did not mean to sound like this.
I just wanted to emphasize that reaper is more for the "nerded" type of engineers and producers. And that if someone makes music with Live and sees it as hobby, there is no reason to jump to reaper because of the possibilities you have, which can be quite overwhelming (also the preferences) if you just want to make some music.

But don't worry, the people in the forum are very nice and are always helping new users. There is even a extra Thread-menu for newbie questions (where no question is a stupid question)

BUT: please don't tell me that Live is a serious DAW, ok? Cause it is not, just look at the technical problems it has.
For some people it may be a great all in one solution, for some it is just a tool.

Regarding seriousness, I meant that If someone REALLY is serious (in terms of quality) about his mixes, Live is not good for this. That does not mean that making music should not be fun, but serious mixing is not that fun (although sometimes it can be)

To me it just seems that Live users are for the most part hobbiists (and maybe some pros, but don't turn this into pro vs hobbiist) at a younger age who use Live because it is so easy to use.
What is the problem with that? it is just a fact.

[wildcon]

Logic here.

2 main reasons:

Firstly I just prefer the traditional type of DAW arrange page setup. I've never really gelled with Ableton's arrange page.

Secondly (as has already been stated), I always find myself getting distracted and messing about. I love the session view, but sometimes the temptation to try just one more thing is counterproductive.

[dazzer]

EDIT: n/m

[Khazul]

To OP:
Your question allmost seems to suggest your thinking how the hell do you mix in ableton when surely it must be easier in something else?

Ill try answer that will reference to comparing working in ableton and cubase, and in particular recent experience with Cubase 6 on a project with alot of kontakt orchestra instrument instances and a huige number of aether reverb instances (so both memory and CPU heavy).

For reasons of curiousity and playing weith new toy syndrome, I acually reproduced much of the project in Cubase after first starting it in Ableton because I wanted to see how the new cubase 6 upgrade performed from a machine performance perpective and general useability. I have both 32 bit and 64 bit cubase 6 installed, but was only comparing the 32 bit version due to plugin availability and that C6/64 bit has some quirks with 32 bit plugins etc times.

From a memory and CPU perspective - Live seemes significantly lighter weight. For reasons that currently escape me, Live seemed to actually cope better both in terms of overall application memory use and in terms fo glitch free audio playback with all the aether, kontakt, sylenth1 and reaktor instances. I actually did not expect this, I had expectted that the muti-cpu support in Cubase 6 would mean it would balance the load better - it didnt and actually it was worse (probbaly more down to plugins - who knows?).

Form a plugin management and general audio/midi routing setup perspective - Live again is so much faster and easier to experiment in. In this particular project I am having to move plugin instances around alot to try thing out as I am trying to recreate a live strig orchestra feel for parts of it which includes some quite interesting reverb modelling that goes way beyond normal reverb use. In live, moving stuff around is just drag an drop - in cubase its a right pain (saving and loading presets, undo that only captures project structure and recordings, but not parameters etc).

However, because in this I have alot of tracks and alot of submixes, then Cubase has some advantages - way way better track and submix organsiation making it way way easier to focus on actual mixing (but locating and tweaking plugins is much much harder), however, because in Live you can freely and immediately assign midi controls to any parameters, then in some ways, tweaking many arbitary plugin and mix parameters across multi tracks and submixes, sends etc in Live does become a hell of alot easier by ear, even if visual the UI has degraded to an allmost unmanage mess due to the lack of good track management facilities in Live (no folders, none of the options for hiding groups of tracks in such a pleasent way, no separet mixer view etc). Its a different way of working which IMHO mean Live is way better to suted to working in a less structured experiement and discovery orientated way, whereas cubase I have to think much kore about how I am structuring tracks, groups, fx, instruments etc etc because its harder to change stuff later, so if you are doing something that is technically complex, than cubase requires alot more up front planning/thinking.

And now to something really really contentious that I will research more when i get the time. I will mention it because it was a perception that I still dont quite beleive and as an audio DSP coding aware techy Im still not sure how its possible unless Cubase oversamples (we all imagine so much in what we hear that its nearly impossible to be truly objective). When I first reproduced the basics of the project in cubase, before applying anything DAW specific, I have to say that the overall sound was somehow smoother and clearer - just nicer in the most vague way (Remember - I hate cubase, I hate steinberg, but have it for historical reasons and cos its cheaper to keep it upgraded than switch). Kind of like the difference you sometimes get comparing working with some plugins att 44.1K vs working in them at 96K - ie very subtle. I was working at 44.1K in cubase. Anyway - Ill research that in due course. If cubase is indeed oversampling somewhere in a way that causes plugins to run at a higher effective sample rate, then it would explain the drastically higher CPU use.

The other thign that could explain higher CPU use - Cubase latency compensates everything as far as I can tell - so its allways perfectly tyight on the audio side - clocks, parameters as well as actual audio. Live only latency comensates audio which given the number of latency issue confusion posts recenlty seems to be a regular source of problems with mixing in Live.

So summary - mixing a complex project in live is just different to work in a more advanced convention DAW. Brief experiences with Logic in the pastt sugest that workingh in logic and working in cubase are kind of similar, except that some things are way way more sensibly arranged and far easier to edit and of course you get the project origansiational advantages of a more complex and powerful DAW. In live there is a ttendency to work in a more rndom manner. I personally find it less condusive to gettig the job done. The more structured though you have to apply in normal DAWs tends to help just get the job done. Also not having to working about lattency issues and otehr things helps.

Depending upon your experience and ability to think through what you do before you do it and the nature fo the project, Live may be easier to work with than something else, or the opposite might apply.

If you are running 32 bit apps on a 64 bit platform, you may fair better with live memory wise - depends upon the project and ram clip use settings etc. If you have a fully native 64 bit option available (as I do) then you may find other issues to plague your workflow and still end up working with 32 bit applications in the complex phase of a project and perhaps reserving 64 bit application use for specific problems.

Regardless of where you do a final mix, I personally find it good to separate the act of arrangement and mix to support composition and arrangement from the actual sound engineering job of creating a mix by bouncing all your tracks to audio and then doinga ground up mix in the DAW of your choice based only on the audio. Its far simpler to just focus on the mix and lots of issues that something plague users of live just go away (even when doing this in live - just be careful about warp modes etc). also this provides the oppotunity and files needed to get an external mix engineer involved if required.

Likewise - bouncing the master mix and then starting another new project to do a mastering process for you own purposes allows for better focus when you separate that job out as well as well as yielding the righ mix to send off to a masttering house etc.