What are you all doing to record jams (digitally, as wav or aiff) for later use?
Ideally I want a tape-recorder like experience. No fuss, just one-button record and pause, and no risk of losing recordings if I just get in the groove for an hour.
I’ve been trying to record directly into the arrange view, in Ableton Live but it’s not ideal in terms of the way the playhead and arrange view work. There’s a M4L device that will help, but that seems clunky.
I considered recording into Audacity (ugh, so ugly), or possibly Adobe Audition (complex, overkill), but none of them seem great. Or perhaps just plug into a Zoom recorder or something, but now that’s an extra step to import, and my computer and audio interface are already set up.
My questions are:
Does anyone have tips for working with Ableton (or other DAWs, maybe?) like a tape-recorder, i.e. just hit record and noodle for an hour, pausing occasionally (to design a patch or something), without worrying about losing stuff?
Or is there any elegant “virtual tape recorder” app (I don’t mean tape emulation or anything); just a robust 2-track recorder app with simple shortcuts and minimal interface that would record straight to disk as wav or aiff files?
Or any other thoughts?
(I’m on macOS fwiw.)
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I guess I’m realizing my issue is mostly about Ableton’s arrange view transport controls. If I pause recording with the spacebar, then hitting the main “record” shortcut (F9) either jumps back to the start of the track, or back to the “flashing playhead marker” wherever I last left it on the track.
It’s not a huge problem, but it’s enough to mean I have to stop and click around in the interface to get back to where I need to pick up recording, and sometimes I forget and overwrite the previous Audio Clip in the track (I know the recording still exists on disk, but it’s a pain).
I’m looking for the true equivalent of a tape-recorder: only one button to hit to record or stop, and you always record from the end of the previous recording. No other thought necessary.
I just have MRecorder on my master. It’s free.
1 click, it names the file with the date and time. You can even synchronize all plugin instances so you can record multitrack with 1 click if you want. All independant of the DAW transport.
I find it easy to just pull up Audacity and record away. If all I need is to record a jam, then Audacity is the easiest no fuss way to do that for me. Its looks shouldn’t be a deterrent - an ugly audio editor is not going to make a jam bad, lol.
Is the way it looks the main reason why it doesn’t “seem great”; is that getting in the way of work and efficiency? I ask because I feel like I am missing or misunderstanding the reason why something like Audacity hasn’t provided a solution from the get-go, or how much easier a solution needs to be compared to what something like that already provides.
Fair point. I don’t love that it’s a proprietary format requiring export; I was hoping for a .wav written directly to disk. And I was experiencing a lot of crashes on initial launch on my M1 Mac, but that may just be VST scanning. I’ll give it another look.
Personally I use a 1010 Bluebox lately, but I think a DAW is actually ideal and a lot more flexible. I mostly use the BB when I don’t have the computer around or don’t feel like rearranging audio interface cabling.
I really want one of those telepathic recorders, where you just think “I want to record this” and it does. No clicking, no button pressing. Hopefully in a future update, it’ll work in hindsight, so I can think “that sounded pretty cool, oh man… I wish I was recording” and it just presents me with the recording I thought I had missed.
I think you are right that crashes may be due to VST scanning. Audacity’s VST support is not totally solid.
Exporting can be made less painful if key shortcuts are used. A basic workflow is to record whatever. Every time I hit record, new audio is appended onto whatever is on the track. This creates new audio clips. Once I have a number of clips to export, I export the whole thing to one audio file using “Export Multiple…”, which is Shift+Ctrl+L on Linux (and Windows probably). That window remembers the last setting used, which is usually what I need it to be. With that in mind, and if I do not need to deal with file names or metadata, I just press Enter on the keyboard to quickly accept all the prompts until it exports, and I am done. Pretty easy and kind of brainless.
If for some reasons I rather save each of the clips as individual audio files, I select each clip, do Ctrl+B to add a label for each, name each label, press Shift+Ctrl+L, select “Split files based on: Labels”, and if I do not need to deal with names, I again keep pressing Enter to accept all prompts until everything is exported.
It’s a little bit more work, but it’s not back breaking work. I figure, if I can record to a cassette, and then write on the sleeve information about what I recorded, timestamps, label the cassette, take the cassette out of the machine and put it back in a case, pop a cassette back in the recorder, wait for it to rewind and fast forward, etc., then I can afford to do either of the things above
I got the 1010music Bluebox to do just this. I wanted to record individual instruments rather than a combined stereo mix, didn’t always want the MacBook Pro out and didn’t have room for any of the large audio interfaces or mixer/recorders.
The BB squeezes into the centre of my (small) multi-tiered synth stand, can record up to 6 stereo / 12 mono inputs and, once set up, supports a basic ‘press record’ workflow.
If you want the simplest possible option you could record directly into quicktime, which has a one button interface.
Option-click pauses the recording.
You’re limited to either compressed files or 44.1khz 24 bit which may or may not be an issue.
In logic you can record without tempo or metronome information and set the recording to start & stop from where you left off, or cycle your recordings as separate takes, but this sounds significantly more complex than you’re after
I just use Ableton. I like that I can see the timeline, so I know that it’s still recording. It also does great at recovering recordings if it does ever crash, and when I want to start playing with the recording, it’s already in Ableton.
I would make a simple one-track Ableton project, set the inputs and outputs, record-arm it, and put it in arrangement view, ready to roll. I would then save that as a template, drag it to my Mac’s dock, and have it ready for one-click deployment.
