Ableton and Audiomulch Rewire-esque hilarity and Tech Info

[PetSonicMonster Profile]

Easy all, I spent last night dicking about something fierce with some of my toys and I feel that it would be a good idea to put my findings up here.

Partly for bragging rights to show how cool I am and also just because I think its useful info some people might find.......useful.



[Background]

So over the weekend I went to a night a mate was putting on which had, amongst other things, a chillout/wierdness room. Talked to a few people and it seemed there were alot of people using Ableton and alot of people using AudioMulch but noone really using them together at the same time.

I suddenly realised that if you could have channels feeding from Ableton into AudioMulch and back then there were an awful lot of posibilities that opened up by using Ableton's loop and sample playing abilities and AudioMulch's much more freeform interface. I had visions of big constantly shifting walls of noise and wierd sonic textures and this seemed like the best way to go about it.

So I decided to look into how I'd go about doing this.


The short answer is that its tricksey, requires 2 other programs to get going and can be really bloody annoying to set up.

Long answer is this:-



[Things you need]

2 or more programs you want to have wired into each other, doesn't have to be Ableton and/or AudioMulch, can be anything you want. Obviously there are some programs that will already have Re-Wire capabilities, how much use this info is in that case I dunno.


Virtual Audio Cable http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html
This is the piece of software that makes it possible, as the name implies it makes virtual audio cables. Each cable can have a number of different channels and there are options for setting up sampling rates blah blah blah, more on this later.

Asio4All http://www.asio4all.com/
This is a universal ASIO driver for what seems to be pretty much everything. It means you can have low latency ASIO working on your laptop. It's basically used as a wrapper around the virtual audio cable because I couldn't get the sumbitch to work without it. It's also pretty useful anyway as it just means you can get considerably better latency if you don't have an outboard soundcard.



[The Setup]

So first things first you want to instal Virtual Audio Cable. The manual is a little hard to follow sometimes but the programmer is russian I think, so I'll forgive him. Once its installed, use the control panel to create a virtual cable. Create 2 Cables, the default settings will be fine for now.

Next install ASIO4All. The settings for this have to be setup within each seperate audio application. I'll go through briefly how I set them up for Live and Audiomulch but obviously depending on what you use it'll be different.

In Live, select ASIO as the driver type and ASIO4All as the device. Hit hardware setup and you get the ASIO4All screen. On it you'll see any audio devices you have and you should also see the virtual audio cable. The ASIO4All manual is well written so read it. Ideally you want the buffersize set low but not so low that you get glitching.
The buffersize for the Virtual Audio Cable should be the lowest you can have it. I havn't noticed any glitching whilst sending data but perhaps this could be dependant on the strain your comp is under.

It's worth while disabling any inputs/outputs you aren't using just because then there's less for your computer to handle.

With that done just tell Live what inputs and outputs you want it to use.


For AudioMulch it's a similar kind of thing, I had the extra channels going to and from the AuxInput/AuxOutput blocks.

Thems be the basics really. Currently I have 2 cables with 8 channels (ie 4 stereo) for feeding between Live and AudioMulch. A bit of experimenting and you should be able to work it out.

Getting the latency sorted is a little tricky but since I'm planning to use this for noise type stuff I'm not sure how much it matters heh.



[End Result]

So what can I actually do with this now? well I've had this organised so that Live is playing a loop on chanel 1, this channel outputs, via a virtual cable to AudioMulch. AudioMulch dicks with the signal and then puts it out on AuxOutput1 which goes, via another virtual cable, back into Live.

Atm I havn't come up with anything really stupid but I havn't played with audiomulch that much yet so there's plenty of time.

I'm not sure how much use anybody here will find this but I reckon that it's worthwhile knowing and that if somebody is wanting to do something similar this could save them a few hours work.


Questions, comments, insults and confirmations of general apathy welcomed.



MPSM

[ncr Profile Website]

I was just thinking how I could do this...Mulch is the business for hopelessly strange things but a bit clunky when you want to get some normalcy in there as well as you tend to have to rely on ther LoopPlayer. Getting Live involved should sort that out.

Sadly I don't have time to try it out tonight but I'll get on it tomorrow. Thanks very much for posting this!

[nsound Profile Website]

hey that virtual audio cable looks pretty cool - might try that out later - thanks

[therolie Profile]

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[rtificial Profile]

I'll have to come back and read the rest of this later since I'm not at home and in a rush. But thanks for posting!

I see richard devine do some crazy math type stuff with ableton, and other devices.