How To Set Up Ableton’s Live Preferences
Before I start let me say thank you to Ableton and Dubspot for all this info which I learned while training at their school when becoming an Ableton teacher. Their blogs are an amazing resource and you should check them out!
To get to Live’s preference window click -LIVE-PREFERENCES Tab. Preferences shortcuts are: [CTRL][,](PC)/[][,](Mac) in Windows this tab is available in the Options menu. This page that will pop up is where you can control how live looks, behaves and creates settings for multiple functions such as Audio, warping buffer size etc…. let’s get into it!
Let’s start with the look feel tab.
Here are the important ones you will use, if you want to know every single button that I never use, feel free to explore the info view (I am a busy gal) I do wish these tabs changed color, but for now when you click on each tab you will notice that the tab is no longer ‘squared in’ by a darker grey line it’s open. Here you can change language, background or skin color and you can also utilize the zoom feature to increase/decrease the size of text/devices on your screen. Note anything over 100% may cause stuttering in the screen, but the range is between 50% and 200%. 100% is where Live is happiest.
Audio Preferences Tab.
This is for Live’s audio connections, especially used in tandem with an audio interface. So in this tab here it says audio and if you look, it says my audio input device is set to audio box. Well, this is my interface that I'm using. So to make this simple the output device is the interface. I'm currently using. If you don't plan on using an input device you can always leave it as no device and or save you a little bit of CPU, but if you want to record from your microphone you would simply change this to inbuilt microphone. This way you can record external sounds. You're not limited to the sounds of just in your computer or your samples or your hard drive. In fact, you could make a complete track using external sounds and it would sound completely original and unique to you!
Next we have sample rate.
44.1 kHz (44100 Hz) is the sampling rate of audio CDs giving a 20 kHz maximum frequency. 20 kHz is the highest frequency generally audible by humans, so making 44.1 kHz the logical choice for most audio material. The sample rate is simply how many times per second, the audio is sampled in order to recreate what you're hearing in a digital environment. Leave your default SR & Pitch on highest quality.The info view will give you an in depth explanation of this, but trust me on it, you want it left there.
Latency
When it comes to Setting Preferences up to Record especially with MIDI instruments and controllers, it’s important to understand audio latency. So what is latency? Latency means the time it takes for you to hear a sound that you touched on your MIDI controller . So, If I touch my keyboard and there is a delay before I actually hear the note, that is latency. If you select a Lower latency you will get a quicker response to to hearing your notes, this will increase CPU usage , so be mindful of that and visa versa. How do you find the right balance? This is where the Buffer’ size comes int play.
I keep my settings at around 512 which is the default setting. if you have a good computer with plenty of Ram, you should probably never have to worry about this. Again, it depends on how many devices, plugs-ins you are using, But I have never had an issue with this setting. If you're using a lot of VST’s, you can always turn up the buffer size to work more efficient 80% is when you're going to start seeing audio dropouts in your CPU so around here you're going to start seeing it staggered and stutter and that means you're overloading your equipment with too much and the brain of the computer is having a hard time figuring out how to process or chips. You can also work in 24 bits your audio is going to be higher quality and capturing the most detail. Another thing is sample rates can go really high with a dedicated audio interface, as high as 192,000.
As for the other settings on this audio tab, leave as it. You will probably never touch them. You might use the test tone when troubleshooting external connections to external hardware but that’s about it.
Link Midi Tab
This is used to help Live recognize external devices for three main purposes. Obviously Playing midi notes,Controlling parts of the interface remotely, syncing the program with external devices, either via Ableton Link or via MIDI. We're going to go to our little mini tab. So the first thing you're going to do if you have a keyboard is plug it into your computer. You'll notice three yellow lights will pop up. Now I've got a keyboard and an interface. So there's two inputs and outputs. These are called mini ports. We've got some tabs over here and basically you always want to make sure the track and remote remain on I just leave them all on and this makes sure that Ableton will be able to receive MIDI input from your controller. When you plug in your controller or keyboard into your computer, you will see the yellow tabs pop up. Simple rule of thumb, keep all the yellow tabs on. (Track, sync, remote). This is your channel configuration and this is where you can decide what inputs and outputs. Basically if you select the input configure it will allow you to enable or disable your inputs on your input device. You've also got options for mono and stereo here. This is cool because you could select either one of these inputs separately, which is great if I wanted to record a vocal that should be mono not stereo. However, if I wanted to do some really interesting recording capturing let's say some outside external places like I was in a empty club or something and I wanted it to have some stereo with let's say the reverb in a empty space I would choose a stereo input here.
The File/Folder Preferences
They Manage Live’s locations of plug-in devices. Its that simple.
Record/Warp/Launch Tab
The record launch tab is by default set to arm tracks on the session automation page and if armed it's only going to record changes created to parameters and tracks that are armed, so you have the option to have more than tracks on and multi record. Be careful you don’t accidentally hit record and go over a bunch of tracks with multiple recordings.
The Licenses/Maintenance Preferences
These are used to manage licensing and installation of the Live platform, leave these ‘on’.
