Alias / Linked / Shared / Pooled Clips - are you using them?

[Dionysos]

It's a fallacy to think that alias clips are only useful for repetitive styles of music. They're helpers for arranging, and typically start "disappearing" from a song as it's being fleshed out & variation is added.

Alias clips are extremely useful for sketching out whole arrangements early, from just a handful of clips, while still being able to make fundamental changes across the whole thing. It's freeing to be able to do that without having to manually select & replace clips, which can also easily lead to accidents like overwriting the wrong clips.

Alias clips are a signal to tell the DAW: These clips represent the exact same musical idea, independently of where it's placed. This is meaningful information, and I'd expect a DAW to allow users to easily make changes to things that are semantically the same.

It's especially weird that Live and Bitwig make it easy to retain this information for consecutive runs of a clip via clip looping, but as soon as you interrupt the loop, you lose the link. That makes no sense.

[antic604]

It's a fallacy to think that alias clips are only useful for repetitive styles of music...

^^^

But whatever makes people feel better about themselves

[Dalle]

For my workflow I don’t see a situation where creating and managing alias clips would be more efficient than just copying and pasting when needed (which isn’t often).

I can see why in modern dance music FL Studio is popular, for example. It's very repetitive music and they just play with modulations and sound, but the content is very repetitive. That's why they need ghost clips I think

Thanks for making the thread complete - there's always one (or two, in this case) "true musicians" who never repeat anything

I repeat a lot, a lot of my music is basically one looping pattern or something many would not consider music There just aren't many situations where I want two clips in different places to constantly stay synced. I'd rather just copy and paste like I said.

[melomood]

It is possible to repeat a phrase within a song simply by going back to it with your fingers on the keys. It will not be identical,but it will give that elusive 'human' quality

[antic604]

It is possible to repeat a phrase within a song simply by going back to it with your fingers on the keys. It will not be identical,but it will give that elusive 'human' quality

...or you can have an exactly the same aliased MIDI clip repeating but with probability and randomness attached to gate, velocity, note delay, MPE parameters, etc. And it will also sound 'human' if done right

[Dionysos]

It is possible to repeat a phrase within a song simply by going back to it with your fingers on the keys. It will not be identical,but it will give that elusive 'human' quality

It is also "possible" to make a song in a multitrack audio editor that doesn't have clips. Just record straight to full-length audio tracks. Wow. So human!

Honestly, you're simply missing the point.

[Dalle]

Any modern DAW should have clip anti-aliasing

[antic604]

Any modern DAW should have clip anti-aliasing

Yes! Plus 16x anisotropic filtering for textures, voxel tree global illumination and PBR material pipeline

[melomood]

It is possible to repeat a phrase within a song simply by going back to it with your fingers on the keys. It will not be identical,but it will give that elusive 'human' quality

It is also "possible" to make a song in a multitrack audio editor that doesn't have clips. Just record straight to full-length audio tracks. Wow. So human!

Honestly, you're simply missing the point.

My tracks are basically that and some clips. The clips are usually full length bits copied & pasted in to clips that an be reaarranged
So yea. I guess I'm missing the point of needing that feature. Ever

[pdxindy]

It is possible to repeat a phrase within a song simply by going back to it with your fingers on the keys. It will not be identical,but it will give that elusive 'human' quality

That is what I do... and the repeated phrase has room to evolve that way.

[antic604]

It is also "possible" to make a song in a multitrack audio editor that doesn't have clips. Just record straight to full-length audio tracks. Wow. So human!

Honestly, you're simply missing the point.

My tracks are basically that and some clips. The clips are usually full length bits copied & pasted in to clips that an be reaarranged
So yea. I guess I'm missing the point of needing that feature. Ever

Considering that's your workflow, you probably use many features that I feel are useless and/or waste of developer's time...

Have you considered this?

[melomood]

It is possible to repeat a phrase within a song simply by going back to it with your fingers on the keys. It will not be identical,but it will give that elusive 'human' quality

...or you can have an exactly the same aliased MIDI clip repeating but with probability and randomness attached to gate, velocity, note delay, MPE parameters, etc. And it will also sound 'human' if done right

I do not desire going thru those steps to sound human when I, an actual physical human being, can do that with my fingers on a keyboard

[vurt]

that's ok for you humans

[vurt]

no one wants to share my clips

[pdxindy]

It is possible to repeat a phrase within a song simply by going back to it with your fingers on the keys. It will not be identical,but it will give that elusive 'human' quality

...or you can have an exactly the same aliased MIDI clip repeating but with probability and randomness attached to gate, velocity, note delay, MPE parameters, etc. And it will also sound 'human' if done right

Still not the same... randomness and probability do not account for groove nor do they respond to what is playing on the other tracks. And the more sophisticated those efforts, the more work it takes to try to duplicate something one can simply play how one wants in the first place.