Stop Leaking Loops

June 19, 2008 2:49 PM

In Ableton Live, how do you properly render a MIDI loop that "leaks" over?

For example, I have a loop that is 2 measures long. Because of delay effects, some of the audio from those 2 measures goes over into the third measure. If I render the loop as a three measure loop, then that third bar will be mostly silence and will mess everything up when I try to trigger the loops live. However, if I render the loop as 2 measures long, then the tail end of the delay effect will be lost.

Is there some sort of feature in Live that accommodates for this? Or is there some kind of technique for dealing with this problem?

posted by god particle to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Render the loop dry and apply the delay effect only when you play it back live.
posted by bunnytricks at 2:56 PM on June 19, 2008

I've rendered a 2-bar loop as four bars, then taken the middle two bars (2 and 3) and looped that.
posted by todbot at 3:13 PM on June 19, 2008 [2 favorites]

I thought of applying the effect live, but I'm hoping there is an alternative solution because I'd like to avoid using more processing power live than I absolutely have to.
posted by god particle at 3:25 PM on June 19, 2008

I'm no Live guru, and I don't use MIDI at all, but here's how I would do this with a sample:

Visual aid for the following instructions, in the Live arrangement view

The first channel has the raw loop and the VST effect. I moved the span markers (shown at bar 10) from the start of the sample until the effect was no longer audible, and rendered the result to a wav, which I dropped back in the arrangement in the next channel.

With the rendering, select the bars that form the loop, right click, and select "Split" to separate the main loop from the residual effects.

Move the residual effect portion to a new channel, and hit Control+D[uplicate] to copy the loop portion. Align the start of the residual sound with the start of the new loop copy. Now you can drop on the "clean-start" sample I have at bar 9 and then loop indefinitely on the composite sample at 10.

If you're fading in or the effect is subtle you can obviously skip the special introductory sample.
posted by moift at 4:31 PM on June 19, 2008