Ableton Forum

Problem :
I edit up a fancy drum break in arrangement out of one sample and I want to use this edit in session, so I can trigger my funky cut-up beat as one clip.

This shouldn't be a problem because it is only one clip, but with different start markers for each instance,

The wish: what I want to do is this ...

select an edited part



drag it to session


drop all those clips into one slot






clip view should now show all the edits on one clip view



My drum tracks that use breakbeats are invariably made from chopped up bits, the clip offset isn't good enough to do this - the only way is in arrangement slices .. but without meta clips I cant use arrangement sliced beats in session.

what happens right now If I drag the selected area to session is this


which is stupid in 2 ways,
1: a billion clips making up 2 bars
2: it doesnt do the follow actions automatically, and that means I have to type in all the 'follow' lengths of the clips manually, by flipping back to arrangement and writing them down !!!

now that is dumb.

CTRL + J. Consolidate!

-but consolidate won't let you keep editing the data un-resampled. Some measure of "selection freeze" might be cool?

Yes, there are benefits to keeping it un-consolidated

but also- why should I need to consolidate when it is only one sample with the start marker moved? It's daft.

The session clip only has to buffer the same amount of data as the 'straight' clip to play this 'meta' clip, the only extra data is control data which is very small.

My example is with one 2-bar pattern, in the real song there are about 60 two bar patterns on that track alone. The disk-space saving would be huge:

60 consolidated edited clips at 1 meg each = 60 meg
60 meta clips of edited clips = 1 meg

and thats just one track!

Whoa, i see what you mean.

That would be cool if it were possible, but the ABES would have to rewrite the way ableton work in some cases. But i see what you mean, its kinda like fusing Recycle with Live, sort of...

or if dragging a group of clips into a track created a tempory "meta-clip" that holds a reference of all that info in a single clip would be nice!

But yeah, there should be an instance of this included in the next version of Live! (hear that ABES?)

Maybe you should play with sample offset to do your work? Might be too much work, but it may also do exactly what you want.

Just a thought

Greg

Sample offset doesnt move far enough, it's maximum is half a bar as I remember. On a two bar clip (or longer) that's pretty annoying, otherwise I'd use it.

You're probably right, and all that scrolling up and down can be a real drag anyways... I know in the past having to go through and mechanically count how many 1/16th's I need to offset up or down as a gigantic pain. It would be nice if the offset scaled to your view and clip... Though now that I mention it maybe there is... I'll have to go back and look.

That does look like a good idea, I'll add my support to this feature request!

interceptor wrote:CTRL + J. Consolidate!

yeah, a simple consolidiate covers everything your saying

most of the clips you consolidate are small enough that "wasting disk space" is negligable. especially with disk drive space so cheap

and if you want to keep your original slices unconsolidated, just keep a copy

consolidate!!

but maybe "save as" first

whats 60 MB anyway

I'd still say that clip freeze would be way cool for this purpose.

mike holiday wrote: whats 60 MB anyway

a shitlot if you have 512 megs of ram and 4 hours to play
...

bump..

Consolidate has become an important step in my workflow. Last night, while consolidating a number of clips I thought I had a brilliant idea called metaclips. A non-destructive edit which contains pointers to a number of other clips, which in turn becomes a new container clip. After a quick search here, I found it almost exactly as Angstrom described so long ago . Excellent idea! This would be incredibly useful and efficient. It would also be cool if you could select a section of time in the arrange and drag to session to become a metaclip with the empty space in tact. Each metaclip would be an arrangement in it's own right, with automation in tact. This would pretty much be my number one feature request. Please keep this alive because this is exactly the type of innovation Live needs I believe fits very well in the philosophy of the software.