Sly One

Blog #4: Ableton Live Tricks – Real Time Rendering

I realise that this is going to be of no interest to 99% of you, but is more for the benefit of future Googlers who are lucky enough to own Access Virus TI synths and use Ableton Live.

I love both, but one thing has been driving me nuts for ages, and everyone had told me it couldn’t be fixed.

One of the seemingly most commonly requested features amongst Virus TI users who also use Ableton Live (including me) is real-time rendering.  Because the Virus can’t render its parts offline, it is necessary to render sets in real time, but Live seemingly provides no options do do this.

Users resort to all sorts of annoying workarounds to this problem (myself included, until I worked this out), such as bouncing the Virus parts down to separate audio tracks, then doing an offline render, or setting up a resampling record track and bouncing the entire arrangement, then fishing around in the project folder for the file, which they would then need to reload in a new set and dither down to 16 bit separately.

However, it is possible to trick Live into rendering your set offline, by making it think that there are real external synths involved in the set.

To do this:

1. Create a new empty MIDI track
2. Add an External Instrument device
3. Route the MIDI to a real hardware MIDI out that isn’t in use (there’s usually one around somewhere!).  In the screenshot I have routed it to the spare output on my FW 1814 soundcard.
4. Route the Audio back from a real hardware audio input (can be in use for something else – it really doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a real input, not rewire or a multi-timbral plug in).  In the example I have routed it back from inputs 7/8.
5. Turn the gain on the external instrument down to -Inf so the low-level interference from your sound card doesn’t affect the output.

Now when you render, Live will detect the presence of a “hardware” device and assume it has to render in real time, meaning that all your Virus parts will also be rendered in realtime.

Joy.