New Series of Articles: Live+Logic
I haven't been very good about updating this site or my software so far this year. I am still doing lots of computer music stuff, though! I changed priorities back in December/January and started trying out lots of new software in order to expand my horizons, educate myself on what's out there, and get new ideas for my own software.
One result of this exploration was I switched over to Ableton Live as my primary environment for making music. Coming from Logic I wanted to continue using Logic's instruments, but I found this was a pain in the ass to accomplish and I had to spend a lot of time experimenting.
For posterity's sake, and because it's past time for me to put some actually interesting/useful content on this site again, I'm writing a series of articles about using Live and Logic together. Article #1, the Overview, can be found here with more to follow soon.
[Update: June 20, 2009] I've posted the second article, MIDI Routing.
[Update: July 30, 2009] I posted the next article, routing audio with Wormhole. Sorry that took so long!
Comments
Re: New Series of Articles: Live+Logic
Hi there, this is a great article, with a good comparison about the options of routing software, would just want to ask how you set up jack osx for this. Thanks!
Re: New Series of Articles: Live+Logic
I've been meaning to finish up an article on Jack but I got sidetracked. Hopefully it will be done in a few days, so check back soon. In the meantime, I just published this article on routing audio with Wormhole.
For a while I thought Jack was the best option but it's just too much of a pain to use. I wanted to work on a song recently, and even though I've done it dozens of times before, I struggled to get Jack working and it totally killed the music-making moment for me. That's really unacceptable: this is supposed to be about making music, not struggling with the tools. Wormhole maybe can't handle as much throughput, but if you are only using a couple Logic instruments it seems to work well and is much easier to use than Jack.
Re: New Series of Articles: Live+Logic
Yes i believe its quite confusing especially working with its connection manager, I've managed to get it started and connected, just read through its documentation, took a while i must say. and yes those double clicks and red marks can be tricky.
Though i have a question with regarding latency about the 3 programs, which produces the least latency?
i tried soundflower already though it seems to have more latency making me put down my buffer size to 256 samples, but i still feel there is a little bit. which made me want to switch, so i tried Jack, pretty much got rid of that issue, i was back to 512. do you think Jack has the upper hand in this thing despite its usability issues?
Thanks
Re: latency
Honestly I'm not really sure about the latency. None of them are perfect and it can depend on various settings and your hardware. I thought wormhole was really bad at first but I guess I didn't have things configured correctly because it seems ok to me now (I think creating a dummy signal in Logic was part of the solution). So now I'd say they're probably all comparable, but it is possible Jack has a slight upper hand... at least, I thought so at one point. As usual with software this complicated, use whatever works for you.
I do want to point out that in my experience, a lot the latency seems to come from using IAC ports for inter-app MIDI communication. I guess it's the nature of event-rate protocols to never be guaranteed to stay completely in sync and incur random delays in order to avoid dropping something higher priority, like the audio signal, due to lack of CPU cycles. So unfortunately, it does not matter which audio-routing solution you use, you can't completely get rid of the MIDI latency.
This is one reason I would never use Live + Logic in a live setting. Once I have a clip that I like, I freeze it and then bounce to an audio file and then use the audio file instead.