HOW TO USE TIMECODE (SMPTE) AND ABLETON LIVE WITH JANDS VISTA USING AN AUDIO INTERFACE!!!!

[Music] so i wanted to make a video to explain how you can get your audio patched for your time code without using dante so basically you have your time code that's playing out of your daw we use ableton and at all of our campuses except the one i'm at we're using the dante network so it goes out of ableton via dante into the lighting computer and then into lockstep out of lockstep then converts it to midi time code and then that's how we get time code in vista well at this campus we had issues with our network and so we had to abandon dante for a season and go with an all analog route something that was more reliable so i just wanted to show how we're doing that and hopefully this will help those of you that aren't using dante yet um and how to uh how to do this without a dante network and just use uh analog interfaces not analog use audio interfaces rather um and what i've been told you can actually use like the microphone input of your computer uh you just have to get the level right going in because if it's too hot um the device won't recognize timecode if it's too quiet it won't recognize the time code so you have to get the level going incorrect and you'll you'll know that because even with like lockstep the little program we use you can see the signal meter so you can see if it's clipping or if it's too low and obviously in vista you'll see the time code numbers rolling when it's getting signal so real quick i'll just flip you around here sorry i'm just using my phone so we have ableton on this machine and if we go over to this machine we have um the patch view or the the yeah the patch view of vista running okay uh so basically what we did was i i we picked up a focusrite scarlett 18 i20 which is a multi-channel interface you don't it could be whatever kind of interface really um we chose to go with this one because once we go back to the dante infrastructure here we can repurpose this either as an on-site a multi-input interface or there's a lot of cool possibilities with this device so we chose to use this uh in the interim here so if we kind of look at the back it's a little bit of a rat's nest which i don't love but the point will still remain there's a bunch of quarter inch cables balanced uh coming out of this interface so we're not using this interface to record at all all we're doing is using it to get a bunch of different audio signals out of the interface three of them are excuse me four of them are going to the audio console via the local inputs on the back via xlr and then the fifth one is going to this little interface it's a presonus audio box and then that's how the audio is getting into this mac mini for vista so basically the patching is actually the same so we don't have to re-patch anything so if you look in ableton outputs one two three four for our audio backing tracks and then five is time code so it's the same patching we use in all of our ableton sets across all of our campuses except this machine instead of using the dante virtual sound card is set to the focusrite interface and then outputs one through four show up on the soundcraft and then output five just runs over here via an xlr and goes into this audio box now you may notice there's this little device that is an attenuator because the signal was coming out of the focusrite so hot that it was clipping the preamp on this audio box because we are going line level into the mic level um and i even and you you might say like well why didn't you use a quarter inch input it might be a line level it's not um these don't have great there's no like input pad on it so basically i just grabbed uh inline attenuator and stuck it in there and dropped it down dropped the signal down 15 db it's set to negative 15 db so basically it's just dropping the signal 15 db and the gain adjustment is all the way down on the preamp and so then if we go here to lockstep you can see lockstep is running the input where it would say ltc linear time code input normally our other campuses says dante channel one this is set to audio box usb channel one this is channel one on that little interface so then if i go here and start whatever we'll just start a song you can see the time code section is outputting five to that uh audio interface it's sending signal if we go over to the lighting computer you'll see it's receiving time code the numbers are running smoothly and then if we go back to vista here we'll see in the upper right hand corner our numbers are rolling and it's fired off a lighting queue so you can do this you don't have to have dante dante certainly helps keep your setup clean and you can change your patching and recall different patches but you can certainly do this with just a bunch of interfaces you have laying around we bought a fancier a little bit of a fancier interface because we knew that we were going to repurpose it eventually but you could get you know just like a behringer interface i've heard they are fine like we're not really audio quality is not the highest priority here we're not trying to make gold records with this stuff um we're just trying to use this as a utility at least for the time code it just needs to get there cleanly so the software can recognize it okay and then we're using it for our backing track playback so the microphone preamps really don't matter at all in any of this [Music] so where in the lighting computer you technically could get away without using the interface if you have a line input and you have a way to adjust your level going into it so it's the correct level so it recognizes the time code ableton though you would need a way to get some multiple outputs out of it because if you had just your headphone jack there's only two channels right so like left and right and you can pan things you could hard pan things so your click is left and then your tracks all blended together is your right side but then you need a third output for your time code you can't blend that in anywhere it has to be time code only you can't like get away with blending like you're clicking your time code and sending that to the lightning computer that that would throw it off i believe so you would need some way to get multiple outputs out of your ableton machine but then again your lighting computer could be whatever really so it's a you know it's a relatively affordable way to do this um and it's been rock solid we keep these interfaces on 24 7 we don't shut our machines off um we'll power cycle them a couple times a month just the computers themselves just to kind of keep them fresh but uh yeah hopefully that kind of makes sense um that's our track run down it's kind of i guess you could say a minimalist setup or like a bare bones basic setup hopefully that makes sense you have any questions please shoot them in the comments if you think of a better way to do this let me know as always like subscribe hit the bell notification to be notified when i make some more videos so yeah thanks for watching the video and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Paul Mitro

Views: 240

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Id: vxsgwNx2C2U

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021