Some questions on understanding OB

Elektron Software Overbridge
#1

Hi folks

Forgive me but im trying to get my head round OB

So any feedback would be appreciated… :slight_smile:

I currently have no dedicated sound card, and no dedicated DAW

Ive downloaded Ableton on a trial just to see what can be done with OB

Got them working in sync with a reasonable amount of latency, and the audio is being streamed into Live
Magic!

But as soon as i record/playback , there is some complicated phasing issues, the AR has become the sound card, for recording, but also for playing back the audio, as a result its a bit messy, and i cant see anyway to change this
As soon as i select ASIO AR as the device in the options, i have no choice about the output
Is that just me?

nb yes ive toggled through the monitoring options

I could see this being a good solution to recording my music, currently i go through a classic hardwear Korg recorder, than bounce everything to the computer

But i dont want to pay big bucks for a DAW, we have the machines, we dont need everything ableton offers

Something like Reaper, or a lite version of cubase would be fine,
live intro would be fine, but only 16 tracks :frowning:

Paralel to using Live, ive also downloaded the beta version of OB and a trial version of Reaper
So far this isnt really working out, the plug in is recognised and works,
but the latency is enormous, and again i have the same problem of the AR being the soundcard,
the audio is being routed and re-routed through the same outputs

So far im not really a fan of the actual plug in, i like using the real machines,
im just interested in recording the audio seamlessly into a daw, and being able to easily save/load banks and samples (which isnt yet the case)

I know its not finished yet, but im thinking is OB really that big a deal,
Whats the main advantages?

#2

I had this effect the very first time too - but it was the monitoring. After switching it off for all input channels of the AR everything was okay. I would just check it again.

#3

Who’s this “we” you’re talking about? :wink:

I guess that OB isn’t really that big a deal if you’re not concerned with tight DAW integration … although the A4 version is still the best patch editor I’ve ever used.

For me, however, 95 % of the time I do my composition in Live using presets and soft synths as placeholders, generally using the crappiest sounds I can find - my theory is that if it sounds ok with GM piano and drums, it’ll sound great once I’ve brought my hardware and frontline soft synths into play.

I only start doing sound design once the skeleton of the track is in place, and I usually only send patterns to my Elektrons to tweak with scenes, performance macros and parameter locks at the very end of the process.

I generally track parts through my sound card and preamps in the end, but the multitrack functionality is still really useful in the writing stage.

So, imho it’s a very big deal that I can pretty much treat my Elektrons like a multitrack vst instrument when I want to and work directly on the boxes when I want to. Best of both worlds. Or at least it was until El Capitan broke Overbridge.

#4

OB is a lot of things
I think the opportunities to sound design and eventually patch manage are good enough reasons - and both should be possible without a DAW once the dust settles
If you are on MAC then you could use any number of free hosts (lots of threads on this) or even Apple’s own AU Lab which is a very very very Light plugin tester / hoster- very simple and it lets you capture audio afaicr