sean
I reluctantly called this a bug, but the Ableton Link implementation in VDJ is broken for certain use cases as it "ignores" phase.
Lets say your playing a gig and there's a guy doing visuals (VJ etc) front of house, you join his Ableton Link session so the visuals will play in time to the music. You press play, there's a 25% chance your track is currently in time. The VJ has Resolume visuals set to trigger on beat 1 and they're triggering on beat 2, etc.
Why? When you start an Ableton Link session the phase starts counting (The Ableton Link spec refers to phase as the beat in the bar the music is currently playing on) so when you press play in Virtual DJ the Ableton Link session could be on beat 2/3/4 of the bar and you have no way of knowing as there's no visual feedback in Virtual DJ.
So what's supposed to happen, most software will wait until the Ableton Link timeline matches, so if you press play it would check if Ableton's phase is at the start of the bar before it plays, probably not appropriate for DJ software. Alternatively we could have visual feedback that shows where the Ableton Link phase is at and just press play at the right time but that also causes problems because sometimes music changes where the downbeat is at.
How Traktor solved this problem is with a reset button, their midi mapping for this is called reset downbeat and in the interface it's just called sync.
I'm guessing most people don't run into this problem because they only use Ableton Link to keep track of individual beats and not the entire bar. Or if the Ableton Link session you join has music playing you just press play in time. But as my example above shows this is often not the case.
My use case is I currently don't have a way to reliably sync Virtual DJ with Resolume.
I found this older post about this but it didn't go into details of why this is a problem https://www.virtualdj.com/forums/250681/Wishes_and_new_features/Ableton_Link_reset_downbeat__effect_button.html
Lets say your playing a gig and there's a guy doing visuals (VJ etc) front of house, you join his Ableton Link session so the visuals will play in time to the music. You press play, there's a 25% chance your track is currently in time. The VJ has Resolume visuals set to trigger on beat 1 and they're triggering on beat 2, etc.
Why? When you start an Ableton Link session the phase starts counting (The Ableton Link spec refers to phase as the beat in the bar the music is currently playing on) so when you press play in Virtual DJ the Ableton Link session could be on beat 2/3/4 of the bar and you have no way of knowing as there's no visual feedback in Virtual DJ.
So what's supposed to happen, most software will wait until the Ableton Link timeline matches, so if you press play it would check if Ableton's phase is at the start of the bar before it plays, probably not appropriate for DJ software. Alternatively we could have visual feedback that shows where the Ableton Link phase is at and just press play at the right time but that also causes problems because sometimes music changes where the downbeat is at.
How Traktor solved this problem is with a reset button, their midi mapping for this is called reset downbeat and in the interface it's just called sync.
I'm guessing most people don't run into this problem because they only use Ableton Link to keep track of individual beats and not the entire bar. Or if the Ableton Link session you join has music playing you just press play in time. But as my example above shows this is often not the case.
My use case is I currently don't have a way to reliably sync Virtual DJ with Resolume.
I found this older post about this but it didn't go into details of why this is a problem https://www.virtualdj.com/forums/250681/Wishes_and_new_features/Ableton_Link_reset_downbeat__effect_button.html
Posted Thu 05 Oct 23 @ 11:32 am