Eat your heart out, Ableton/Serato The Bridge.
Native Instruments’ Traktor runs four decks at once without breaking a sweat, and there are various ways of incorporating sampling, scratching, and vinyl in a live rig that are pretty easy to set up. But lately we’ve seen some unusual options to build more elaborate setups. Rane even offers a digital mixer with two USB ports so you can, among other things, get four decks in Serato by running two computers at once. (Hey, never knock the brute force method of solving a problem.) And The Bridge, introduced to great fanfare by Ableton and Serato, synchronizes the transport and basic set information between Live and Serato. That’s to say nothing of the solution of using Ms. Pinky inside Live.
But none of this compares to Ilan Kriger’s method of getting four “decks” out of Ableton Live. He simply runs four complete instances of Live — one copy of Live 5, one copy of Live 6, one copy of Live 7, and one copy of Live 8 — in order to spread them out like the four decks in Traktor. (I’m not even going to ask Ableton whether this violates your license. Maybe you could start selling Live six packs?)
He uses a Mac for the job, but a PC should work, too. (Actually, that’d be an interesting performance comparison; you’d need to make sure your ASIO drivers on PC allow multiple apps to access the same interface.)
Go ahead. Hit the comment button. Tell us that this is an insane, impractical solution to the problem. (Really? Wow, I … didn’t … expect you to react that way. I must have entirely missed that.)
And good work, Ilan. Now, Ableton engineering teams, see how important the work you do on each release is? You never know when someone will run all of the different iterations you’ve built over the past four years at one time. Got it?
I think we need to invent a new prize for Only Because It’s There ingenuity. Suggestions? What should the trophy look like?
Ilan’s setup, blogged and translated by Google from Portuguese into English
Original Português
It’s a “tutorial,” in case you want to replicate the results. (In which case, I’ll have what you’re having.)
I will say this: inter-application communication is important, even if this isn’t the most practical example.
Original video (Português):