Another plead for Elastic Audio

Community Ideas for Ardour
#1

Hi and nice to meet you all! I’ve just started using Ardour after more than ten years of using Pro Tools, and I’m really loving it :slight_smile: The only thing that is making me doubt about switching is the lack of Elastic Audio or something similar. I know this topic has been discussed before and you’re probably planning on implementing it at some point, but I thought I’d share my experience in case it can add anything to the conversation and hopefully bring this feature a few steps up the priorities list :pray:

I record and produce my songs myself, and I usually lean more towards spending less time practicing my performances before recording, and fixing them later with Elastic Audio, rather than practicing more so later I have to fix less stuff. My reasons for this are that it’s just way faster, and that I don’t apply moral value to skill or how good a performance is. So if the tool is there and it allows me to get the same thing twice as fast, I’ll use it.

When experimenting with Ardour lately, it kind of forced me to practice more before recording, as editing is slower without Elastic Audio. So I thought the less editing I have to do, the better. I did get better takes, but at the end I found myself editing them a lot anyway. No matter how good a performance is, there’ll always be imperfections, and I like to adjust those. I know this is subjective and other producers will prefer to leave those imperfections. But for me (and I presume I’m not alone in this), just knowing that you can make it better is too big of a temptation :rofl:

The main takeaway is that obsessive editing is something that will happen anyway for producers with a workflow like mine, no matter how good the performance is. It’ll just take longer to do without something like Elastic Audio.

Because of this, it’s still more efficient to use Pro Tools for me, and I’ll stick with it for professional projects with a deadline. For personal projects, I’m excited to keep experimenting with Ardour. But if something like Elastic Audio gets implemented, I’m all in!

Thank you so much for developing such a great and customizable open-source software, I’m excited to see what comes next :smiley:

PS: I know there is the region stretching feature, but you have to do a lot of slicing anyway, plus having to change tools constantly, it ends up not being much faster than regular editing for me

#2

Some time ago i had about the same train of thought…but…here’s something i wasn’t even aware of…and it’s pretty old info…like, almost a decade old :). 34:20
https://youtu.be/dk2AMwc4e2k?si=6OduisuTNRkURZ-b
If you lay it all out as @paul did at the event, it raises all kinds of different questions that are simply not easy to answer…

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#3

I am curious. If you don’t enjoy practicing or playing your instrument, and also do not like human imperfections, would it not make sense to instead just use AI to generate the sound?

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As for the actual issue: under the hood elastic Audio is already available, but so far there is no GUI for it (it’s available via Lua e.g. the “swing it” script which moves every other 8th note back). There is one main problem with this: the quality of the stretched audio varies greatly with available free/libre software libraries…

#4

I personally have never been a “fix it in the mix” kinda guy. Great performances are essential when initially capturing, making mixing a breeze. I know many people like this however, who would much rather punch in and fix 20 bad notes rather than just play it again.

While there is nothing wrong with this kind of work flow, it seems to be way more time consuming and way less efficient.

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#5

Na yeah I’ll never understand the appeal of this kind of musical surgery. In my opinion, it chips away at the humanity in a piece of music and results in something sterile and less animated. But some people just want that I guess…? And maybe I’m just becoming a grumpy old man shouting at clouds with misplaced, out of touch values.

In the context of Ardour, I’d agree. Plus my point about the subtle erasing of the humanity and ‘life’ (for lack of a better adjective) in a given track.

But in a DAW like Reaper, for example, with stretch markers and ReaTune and so on, you can become quite snappy and rapid in the quest for surgical perfection.

I can’t stand the sound of perfectly quantised instrumental parts and über pitch corrected vocals parts myself and using Ardour in place of Reaper made me much more performance-focused and in turn made my music just better. I think…? Thus my gentle advice to the OP would be to embrace the REC screen in Ardour, embrace shifting the focus from hyper surgical micro editing quests for perfection to a more performance-oriented approach and see if that spices things up a little.

Anecdote to close - I thought the lack of CTRL+Z at mixer level in Ardour would seriously frustrate me but it’s actually made me a lot more considerate and methodical when approaching mixing decisions and parameter changes. So you never know - a forced change in approach can be just the ticket to newer, better productions. Maybe.

#6

Yeah, I agree 100%. However, occasionally a “mistake” during a performance can lead to greatness, at least to my ears :slight_smile: That’s what happened to one of my song ideas, as I was jamming a long, I missed a beat and it struck me as the best thing that happened to this song: it turned from a regular 4/4 rhythmic sig to a 15/8 that sounds almost square if you don’t pay attention. This made me reworked the melody and rhythm guitar that became something much more special. The takeway is that whatever you plan to record, play it again and again with openness and free flow. Once you’re in the zone, anything can happen …

#7

[commercial quote] As both an obsessive editor and a live performance focused musician and recorder, I find Ardour’s workflow truly excellent :slight_smile: [/commercial quote]