Auto-Generated Click, Slate, and Cues
Simplifying the Programming Process
Today, we're updating two features in beta and introducing an early preview of a new one.
Feels Like Magic
There are a lot of hidden steps that go into programming a song, and programming a set that feels consistent from song to song. I want the process of using Pliris to feel like magic — solving many of those problems without you even knowing they existed in the first place. Today, we're taking two of the features we've been beta testing to the next level, and introducing a brand new feature.
Auto-generated Click, Cues, and Slate
Since I've been using Bands, I've exported audio directly from my Ableton set, including song slates, cues, and click tracks. But as I've been meeting with customers, a common question has come up: how do I add click and cues to my songs in Bands? While it's certainly possible to go back and re-render click and cues, auto-generated click, cues, and slates give you that for free.
To use the feature, navigate to your Band's settings and enable "Auto-generated click, cues, and slate." This setting applies per band, across all songs. A few notes:
- The click follows the song's tempo map. If the stems are off-grid, the click likely won't be in time. The easy fix is to open your song in Ableton, shift your stems to the grid, save your .als, and drag it onto the arrangement page to update.
- If your song already has click and cues, you'll now have doubles. For now, you can mute your original uploaded files, delete them, or disable the feature to use your printed click and cues instead.
- Cues follow song sections, so if your cues sound off from your song sections, it means your sections don't align with your audio.
- Cue volumes aren't consistent across all samples, but this will be fixed in a future update.
Auto-align Updates
One of those important but hidden tasks of a playback programmer is aligning stems to Live's grid. If you're using MP3 files, they carry a small amount of pre-roll metadata that causes your stems to appear out of sync with Live's grid.
If you don't know this and upload to Bands, you end up with an Ableton set where the click and cues follow the grid but the stems don't. If you don't understand the problem, you might think "this app sucks!" And while you might still think that, this is the same problem that exists in Ableton itself.
We released auto-align in beta a few weeks ago, and today we're releasing an update that improves that experience. Enabling auto-align should trim unnecessary space and attempt to align your stems to the grid. Like our other beta features, it's per band and can be disabled completely. We'll continue testing this in beta for a few more weeks and need more specific feedback before enabling it system-wide.
The goal is to get this dialed in so that the impact is automatic for people who don't fully understand how to sync stems to the grid, and has zero impact for folks who are OCD to the max in how they export and manage their stems.
Auto-Count In
If you're one of those OCD-to-the-max programmers, you render your stems intentionally with exactly the count-in you want. But if you're like the rest of us, or you get stems from various producers, across multiple albums, or from multiple sources...
Some songs will have a 1-measure count-in, some 2, and some none. And while that's sometimes an intentional decision for a specific song, my hunch is most of us are better served by defining how many measures of count-in we want and having that be consistent across all songs.
That's why we released our auto-count in feature a few weeks ago. Today, we're bringing that experience consistently across Ableton exports and the on-page player.
You can now enable the auto-count in setting per band, and it will intelligently apply across all songs in your account. Combined with auto-align, no matter how much pre-roll or what count-in your stems were printed with, you'll have a consistent count-in across every song.
Of course, if you want to customize per song, you can disable auto-count in and use the printed count-in, or change a specific song to 1 or 2 measures.
Your count-in applies both on the page and in your Ableton exports, and updates in real time.
Reducing Programming Time by 90%
All of these features move us toward the goal of reducing programming time by 90% or more.
Enable these beta settings today to start testing, and share any feedback using the support chat below!