Post
by rdan76 » Wed Feb 22, 2023 5:24 pm
Hey all! This thread came to my attention because I'm interested in finding a more efficient way to document my mixdown-settings.
Sometimes when I finish a mix that turns out really well, I like to document all my mixdown settings in a form which exists outside of Ableton. I do this because data stored only within the proprietary formats used by audio-recording software is always at hazard of being lost. Anytime there's a software update, anytime you update plugins, anytime you change PCs, there's always the very real risk that settings in old mixes might not be preserved. I have many old mixes, at this point, which I can technically still open -- but all the plugin-settings are wiped, because even if I still have copies of those plugins, these projects used older 32-bit versions of those plugs which won't work on my current system. And so, unless I'd notated the settings for those mixes somewhere, I no longer have any record of what I did in those mixes.
So I'm in the habit of documenting any mixes which turn out particularly well, by taking a whole lot of screenshots and making a lot of notes in plain-text files. The upside to this is that these file-formats don't rely on proprietary software to open; 20 years from now, I should still be able to take a look at these records and recall what I did on these mixes. The downside is that it takes hours to document a mix in this fashion, and it's no fun at all.
So I was happy to learn that the Ableton ALS file is really just a gzipped XML file. That means, in theory, I could finally stop documenting my mixes in this way. Since all project settings and values are recorded in the ALS file, and the ALS can be extracted into the widely-accessible XML format, then IN THEORY I should just be able to make a copy of my ALS, extract it to XML, and bam, documentation done.
But nothing in life is that easy.
Upon looking through the extracted XML from one of my recent project-files, I noticed that all the numerical values are stored within the XML using some kind of floating-point math. (Well, I'm calling it floating-point math, but all I really know for sure is that these are numbers in a decimal notation with several places behind the decimal; that reads like floating-point to me, but that description might be technically incorrect.) I guess Ableton must apply some kind of mathematical transformation, at runtime, in order to change these saved values into what I see in the program.
Having those numbers in the form in which they're stored in the XML does me no good at all.
Does anyone know how those numbers get transformed by Ableton into the actual values presented in the program? Frustratingly, I imagine there might be many different transformations applied, depending on what the value represents -- for instance, I would imagine that the value representing the panning of a track would have one kind of mathematical transformation applied, while the value representing volume would have another. And I imagine many of these transformations might be logarithmic functions, given how dB is a logarithmic scale.
Has anyone figured any of this stuff out? Is anyone aware of a reference somewhere?