XLN Life

[SLiC]

A final concern, and this one is more about XLN's product lifecycle approach than Life specifically...

Yup- I posted something similar earlier, XO was so close to great and really the things people desperately wanted didn't seem difficult to add (like exporting 16 drums not just . There seem to be very similar limitation in Life (like just 8 sample slices to sequence)

We can only hope they do a few updates and listen to what the users want.

[iowastate89]

Haven't seen this answered, apologies if redundant.

If I have a long slice, is there a way to spread that across multiple sequencer steps?

[Teilchenbeschleuniger]

Really impressed with how it nails those perc toplines, and the whole concept is fresh. Bit on the pricey side tho..

[kraster]

Haven't seen this answered, apologies if redundant.

If I have a long slice, is there a way to spread that across multiple sequencer steps?

You'd have to slice the slice!

You can manually edit each slice if you want.

Each sequencer step triggers a slice.

There are four lanes but a lane can be assigned more than one slice. The max amount of slices is 8 (I think).

If a lane has more than one slice you can trigger a slice on a step basis.

[kraster]

I was initially cynical about this plugin.

Demoed it and got bored with it but I kept running into scenarios where I felt like Life would be exactly the thing for a particular scenario.

So I bought it and it has become one of my most used plugins by far.

As someone said above, it's actually the simplicity and immediacy that's its biggest appeal.

It's very easy to get interesting results.

[gExpectations]

yeah im demoing right now it feels amazing and extremely frustrating at the same time. very functional, immediate and beautiful but super limited. 150€ is a big ask for something this limited. id even probably feel a bit bad getting for 80 but i might. its very useful to turn foley and samples into supportive percussion layers. export functionality is great so you can sequence elsewhere.

[sandandpaint]

Is there anything similar? There are slicers and loop manglers around but nothing else I know seems quite like this

[kraster]

Is there anything similar? There are slicers and loop manglers around but nothing else I know seems quite like this

Not really with the same feature set.

Hy Slicer, Audiomodern's loopmix and Sugarbytes Egoist/looperator have ways of chopping up a beat and resequencing it but they all lack the "intelligence" behind Life.

Whatever wizardry is going on behind Life seems to just nail the slicing and sequencing aspect.

[sandandpaint]

Is there anything similar? There are slicers and loop manglers around but nothing else I know seems quite like this

Not really with the same feature set.

Hy Slicer, Audiomodern's loopmix and Sugarbytes Egoist/looperator have ways of chopping up a beat and resequencing it but they all lack the "intelligence" behind Life.

Whatever wizardry is going on behind Life seems to just nail the slicing and sequencing aspect.

thanks, I am finding Life pretty impressive while demoing across a lot of different material. I just have to talk myself over the price which is a bit too expensive for a casual purchase

[oleg1978]

I've been using Life to create drum fills with really excellent results. Essentially by exporting a grove I've already built into a 2 track file, then importing that groove into Life and using the randomizer to export 'mudpies' that I can then use as fills. Life really excels at this use case. It's so much easier and you get more 'happy accidents' than manually programming fills, using canned MIDI fills, or using arps on drum machines.

That sounds very interesting. Could you please explain this in more detail?

[billinder33]

I've been using Life to create drum fills with really excellent results. Essentially by exporting a grove I've already built into a 2 track file, then importing that groove into Life and using the randomizer to export 'mudpies' that I can then use as fills. Life really excels at this use case. It's so much easier and you get more 'happy accidents' than manually programming fills, using canned MIDI fills, or using arps on drum machines.

That sounds very interesting. Could you please explain this in more detail?

Sure thing. Do a stereo export of 1-2 bars of your song's main drum beat. Import it into Life. Randomize, tweak, etc. Life's parameters until you find some rhythms you like that will work as fills in your song. Bounce several those back to into your DAW and place them where ever you need a fill. All of the drum fills in this track were created with Life using this technique:

https://soundcloud.com/user-408796112/y ... now-master

[sandandpaint]

I've been using Life to create drum fills with really excellent results. Essentially by exporting a grove I've already built into a 2 track file, then importing that groove into Life and using the randomizer to export 'mudpies' that I can then use as fills. Life really excels at this use case. It's so much easier and you get more 'happy accidents' than manually programming fills, using canned MIDI fills, or using arps on drum machines.

That sounds very interesting. Could you please explain this in more detail?

Sure thing. Do a stereo export of 1-2 bars of your song's main drum beat. Import it into Life. Randomize, tweak, etc. Life's parameters until you find some rhythms you like that will work as fills in your song. Bounce several those back to into your DAW and place them where ever you need a fill. All of the drum fills in this track were created with Life using this technique:

https://soundcloud.com/user-408796112/y ... now-master

that is a great idea all round

[wayford]

So I was playing around with it today and it finally hit me: I have heard these patterns somewhere. And that somewhere is XO.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it initially, until this happened. I recorded some random mouth clicks via the Life Recorder app, then opened the sample in the Life plugin and I have heard a pattern I distinctly remember - called "Are and Be" from XO's Core Content Library. It was 1 to 1, the exact same pattern with little differences.

Now, when I was downloading Life I saw a 600mb file being downloaded called "ml... .pak".

.pak files is what XLN Audio use to package various content: from one shots, to multi-samples, to midi files, etc.

This leads me to believe that one of these might be true 1) it's using patterns from XO or 2) (more likely) the Machine Learning model was trained on the patterns from XO's Core library and the additional XOpaks.

I usually don't like XOs patterns and that's why I could immediately hear the similarities between Life patterns and the patterns from XO. There's something about XO's patterns which just isn't for me - they're always a bit too much. And that's exactly how I feel with Life. At least in Life you can adjust the patterns.

Lastly, this is not a pattern generator, but rather an XLN pattern generator, if you know what I mean. It makes sense obviously, but in Life I can hear the taste of XLN Audio, the patterns don't feel necessarily neutral or universal.

Anyway, this whole thing is too long, I'll eventually upload the clip of the identical XO/Life pattern.

[m-ac]

I've mentioned this before - Life doesn't generate new patterns, it just pulls from a predetermined set of patterns similar to (as you mention) XO. Spend any amount of time with it and it gets old, FAST. If it could generate truly random but musical patterns using AI, it would be 10x the app it is now. I'd love to see it, but I'm not holding my breath.

[SLiC]

Unfortunately updates for XO were minimal and I don’t expect we will see major updates to Life.