Possible FR : Increased recording / loop time

[brendanw]

Hi there...
Until now I've only used my copy of liveslice in the studio, having fun mangling all sorts of loops for production. However, I've just started to experiment with it in some live electro acoustic projects I'm working on (mainly with a live string quartet). I've unfortunately come up against the 32 bar limit for loop sizes quite a few times...
A lot of the music I do is quite free form. I apologise completely if this can already be done, but I'd actually LOVE to use the live slice features, but just on very long loops. Some of the performances / pieces go for 20 or 30 mins, and having usuable loops of 3 or 4 mins would be absolutely fantastic. I have a performance coming up in 4 weeks where I've specifically composed a piece to play back mutilated audio sampled from the quartet - but with approx 3 mins offset. Therefore, to do it properly, I really need something like liveslice to be able to record loops that long. There is probably a simple way to do this...I'm just not sure what it is.
Any comments / etc would be appreciated.
Maybe I'm wishing for too much, because its not really something that would be used too often...but is it at all possible to make a "hacked" or modded version that would accomidate something like this? Being at home with the liveslice interface, it would make my job SO much easier. Infact, I really don't know other software I could use. (I've considered Steim's LISA-X, and would get it straight away, except my two main laptops are both PC. FWIW, I'm using energyXT these days as my live host - after using ableton live for years, and just not really finding my way with it like I've been able to with eXT.)

Thanks for reading. Brendan.

[R.A.W.]

one problem with this is that LS for now handles the loops in your RAM..
that means either you need an awful lot of RAM or LS needs to be changed to use some kind of DFD technology

[brendanw]

Hm. Ram, yeah. But most ppl have 1 gig these days, and it could be an option for those with loads of RAM to be able to turn on...
I have 2 gig just in my laptop, which would give more than 150 mins of 44/16 STEREO loops...more than enough for a few 5 min samples.

Even when I'm running liveslice inside eXT with tonnes of plugs, I seem to have over 1.5gigs of free ram, even with quite a few samples loaded inside eXT. I'd do it all there if i could do it all in real time aka liveslice.

So is RAM really an issue...

I'm just guessing...

Brendan.

[S.HUSH]

+1 on this. Longer loops is one of the features that would allow me to ditch Ableton Live.

[ohm]

it's quite an easy change to implement, and when I implement cropping of recorded loops, it'll be even more handy to be able to record more than 64 beats, so I'll add it to my list.
I'll simply add an option in the settings page so you can raise the limit to like 512 beats or so, keeping the current 64 beats as default.
Note that the recorded audio is 32bit - defined by the vst standard (that was recently expanded to include a 64 bit option though), anyhow - this means that recorded audio will take up twice as much space as CD quality audio. It would helt a bit if I added a "record in mono" option for guitars and mike recordings.

[DarkStar]

or, let the user select the "record bit depth"(16, 24, 32, or even 8 for lo-fi) on the settings page?

[ohm]

I could do that, at least if the recordings were normalized first to avoid clipping when converting from float to integer. Good idea.

[brendanw]

Sounds VERY interesting.

This would then do most of what I've used LISA X for in the past (steim) - but now I no longer have a mac laptop, i've had to go for other solutions.

And sorry - yeah, of course ur in 32bit float land. Wasn't thinking.

Thanks.
Cheers, Brendan.