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

[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

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.

Sure, but I've no other option - I can't play

[Biscotto]

I don't think BTW or Live developers are going to alter their Roadmap based on a KVR Poll about a feature that seems so easy to implement but strangely not there for at least a decade...

It's either not their majority of users base' whish or technically a rewrite of internal database not worth the "Silent in the Cave".
There are simple workarounds but if that is a vital/essential feature for your daily music production the best is to use a DAW that does it perfectly already.

This is the reason why I'm revisiting BTW being a Ableton forever users... Modulations!
Ableton can do, and well I would argue, but BWS does it Perfectly and since I'm in a transition period I go to a TOOL that does what I need rather than try to convince the Developer AND WAIT their grace to allow me to make music...

And I'm wondering how these Alias users end up in Ableton or BWS in the first place when such an Essential feature for their music isn't there to begin with...

[ozinga]

With Cubase, I have started to use them constantly. Both for midi and audio.

[inkwarp]

I value alias/ghost clips in Studio One. It's perfect for me.
I was an FL user for a while and the problem there was the opposite, i.e. clips are ghost copies by default and you have to make a copy unique if you wish to omit it being edited. I would like them in Ableton for the specific purpose of modulation and automation of synths etc. They are extremely useful to me. In Ableton, once the clip is in the arrangement view it's unique and can only be edited in situ or dragging back into the session view. It's not such a problem that would stop me from using Ableton but it would be a good option to have.

[rockguycris]

definitely feeling the lack of this feature in Live. It's the main reason I can't commit to it, and still use FL. Otherwise Live is amazing.

The problem becomes worse the longer I make my arrangements, because I need to remember where I copy-pasted the pattern and always copy-paste again. It becomes even worse with automation, as I might want to some automation on a specific clip, but not on another instance of it. FL Studio achieves this by having automation clips (patterns) be different from MIDI/Audio clips, and not a "lane" in that track.

[antic604]

...It becomes even worse with automation, as I might want to some automation on a specific clip, but not on another instance of it...

Alias Clips won't solve that, though. You can unlock the automation envelopes from clips by disabling the "lock" icon in the top-right corner of the screen:



https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/autom ... -envelopes

[rockguycris]

...It becomes even worse with automation, as I might want to some automation on a specific clip, but not on another instance of it...

Alias Clips won't solve that, though. You can unlock the automation envelopes from clips by disabling the "lock" icon in the top-right corner of the screen:



https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/autom ... -envelopes

I know about that. But I'd wish I could have FL's "pattern for everything" approach with Live's better interface and UX (personal taste, I know).

[bermudagold]

When I first tried DAWs 15+ years ago, this was one of the first features I couldn't believe DAWs didn't have...most CASE/IDE tools in other industries already did, because the focus had long been on OOP in software development...You build your taxonomy/ontology with object orientation from the ground up...I think there are a whole class of features missing from DAWs emanating from this concept...this notion of linked clips is just one...
I remember people would always brag that Samplitude had object orientation, so I assumed that's what they meant and it would therefore have these types of features, but then I found out at the time it didn't, they were just one of the earliest to implement individual clip FX/properties.
I suspect this feature was a hold out because most of the tools never started like this, and legacy concepts in the infrastructure that are at odds with this may impact its inclusion today.

Tracktion has had this for a few years in multiple forms, but I had no idea so many DAWs had implemented it, so that is good to know...It can definitely be a time saver in editing to get your ideas to a mature state...especially at the multitrack level of abstraction...If you can define an object as "chorus" for instance (equivalent to say your scene 6 in ableton/bitwig session view), and later you want to make a change to the chorus. You dont have to re-align your session view with your arrangement view in ableton/bitwig after changing the scene; scrolling and searching for where to be copying and pasting, and resetting all the attributes of all the clips every time the chorus appears in the arrangement view......you edit once and the changes appear everywhere there is an instance of that object.
Once you have a holistic view of your composition, its movements, and understand where you want to go with it, then you can re-perform repeating motifs individually and uniquely, but you don't have to.
I've never viewed these as esoteric luxury features,...they are fundamental components to efficient workflow in any form of design/development tools in any arena.

[Abiah]

Have been using Live for 10 years and every day I'm confounded by the lack of linked clips, especially across the session-arrangement divide. I've talked to two of the product owners at Ableton and the idea had seemingly never occurred to them.

Never mind that every other daw & sequencer I've encountered has this feature at it's core.

Except for Bitwig lol. naturally.

[Abiah]

it's also legitimately interesting how the horizons of loyalist users become bounded by the software they use, and how they enforce those limitations defensively. To everyone else, it appears like a kind of stockholm syndrome.

example: Digital Performer didn't allow muted midi notes until v9. Loyal users would harangue others for even requesting such a feature, they saw it as a preposterous thing to want, useless. Literally ever other daw had it.

edit: i haven't scanned this thread for this type of response.

[Abiah]

I built a replacement to Alias Clips that does the same thing, but its simply based on Clip names, with a handy floating window for autonaming. T

quite sure i tried this, and it was a clever approach, but it broke down if the front portion of the clips had been sliced in any way. So if a clip on the arrangement is sliced into two clips, then both those would be replaced with the entire pattern again. Where you had first had one pattern sliced across two contiguous clips, the M4L ghost clip device would replace both clips anew, such that the pattern would play from the beginning twice.

This also meant that clips couldn't be recorded in legato mode, unless the quantization was 1Bar.

I'm not sure any of that would be possible to fix using max for live.

[antic604]

I've talked to two of the product owners at Ableton and the idea had seemingly never occurred to them.

This is actually the most shocking aspect of it all. And that's why so few Live users request it - it hasn't occurred to them either. Actually one of the 1st Live videos I saw was emphasizing how the clips between Session and Arrangement are independent.

And then Bitwig copied that mindset without giving it a second thought either

[pdxindy]

Have been using Live for 10 years and every day I'm confounded by the lack of linked clips, especially across the session-arrangement divide. I've talked to two of the product owners at Ableton and the idea had seemingly never occurred to them.

Never mind that every other daw & sequencer I've encountered has this feature at it's core.

Except for Bitwig lol. naturally.

Back when I used to do 3D modeling, I constantly used object instancing. If you want to duplicate and distribute a bunch of street lights down the avenue, of course you still want to be able to edit one of them and have all of them update. Especially cause clients often decide to change such things after the fact or even last minute!

And in human spaces there are so many duplicate objects... light switches, door handles, wine glasses, fluorescent lights in a commercial space, etc., etc., etc.

With my music creation, I don't find myself wanting to make non-continuous duplicates very often. I use Bitwig and it is not something I particularly think about/wish for cause I'm just not doing it much.

I suppose with both Live and Bitwig having the Clip Launcher (Session view), that is a form of linked clips cause you can trigger clips/scenes multiple times as the project plays and it always references the same data. Seems like one or both of them would have made that persistent in the Arrange view by now.

[ozinga]

I've talked to two of the product owners at Ableton and the idea had seemingly never occurred to them.

This is actually the most shocking aspect of it all. And that's why so few Live users request it - it hasn't occurred to them either. Actually one of the 1st Live videos I saw was emphasizing how the clips between Session and Arrangement are independent.

And then Bitwig copied that mindset without giving it a second thought either

For the past 20 years bounce in place or to have the ability to fade, edit multiple clips on the same track has not occurred to most users and Live developers either
At least Bitwiggers were aware that these basic features are actually useful

[xbitz]

just sayin, Cakewalk by BandLab, latest 2021.06 Update 3

‘Duplicate Selected Clip(s) as Linked Clips’ command (press CTRL+SHIFT+D)

http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?p ... s.001.html