Ableton Live Tutorial How to use Logic Pro Mainstage as a plugin via Soundflower

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I couldn't pass up educational pricing on Logic Studio, so I found a way to use Logic's soft synths inside of Ableton Live. The virtual MIDI ports in OS X provide MIDI communication, and Cycling 74's Soundflower utility provides the way to route audio between Mainstage and Live (since they don't like to play together with rewire).

I aggregated all my audio devices into one so that I could use my microphone and soundflower at the same time. You don't have to get that fancy if you just want to route audio from logic to live.

remember to set the buffer size in soundflower to be as low as you can without breaking up in order to minimize latency.

The audio is a little funky due to some experiments with compressors and audio rates.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• ableton live
• logic pro
• mainstage
• ableton
• live
• vst
• plug
• in
• EXS24
• ES2
• ES1
• synthesizer
• tutorial

[2xtrbo]

On the external instrument in ableton, how did you make your aggregate audio device as 13 and 14? My aggregate device consists of Soundflower and my M-Audio Profire 610 so in the external instrument dropdown for audio I see only the 4 outs from my mixer.

[learnMax]

@2xtrbo in the aggregate device my ultranova is 1&2, my VS-100 is 3-12 and SoundFlower (2 channel) is 13&14, as you aggregate sound drivers they add up.

[eastparkreggae]

can't get the external instrument track to record audio - just midi. so when i change my mainstage patch, the bit i've just recorded changes too. aargh. help!

[learnMax]

@eastparkreggae if you want to record the audio from the track you can do that routing in ableton from one track to another. The mainstage track only records MIDI since I want to use Mainstage just as I would a MIDI synth.

[jackyangmusic]

Ok, I've been at this for about 6 hours now and I just can't seem to get it right. I also keep getting midi Loop messages from MS (MainStage). Do I need to fire up MS first, or doesn't that matter? I went into Live Pref. Audio and switched from my Interface (Saffire Pro40) to soundflower. When I did this I actually got a signal read in my MS track in live but it was light blue in all tracks and there was no sound. I get this same reaction when I forget to choose my interface in Live.

[learnMax]

@jackyangmusic the order you launch them in shouldn't matter, but remember you are sending MIDI to mainstage and getting audio back from it. If you're getting a MIDI loop you must be routing MIDI back from mainstage somehow.

[mbreeson]

in other words: how do you avoid rewire from being activated when you load up both programs (ableton and mainstage)

[mbreeson]

how do you avoid the rewire conflict?

[coldwaraaron]

Dude loosen up on your noise gate settings next time.

[DubStepClass]

my last post is the continuation of the post which precedes it.

[DubStepClass]

then as i played more it was as if someone were turning up the samples on the crusher. and now as i am typing it sounds fine but with extremely high latency. any suggestions bud?

[DubStepClass]

Hey guy... this is a very brilliant tutorial but i have a serious concern. got my setup perfect down to the last detail yet from ableton i am getting a very distorted version of whats coming out of mainstage (sonds like mainstage is being digitally down-sampled or bit crushed). so i restarted the whole system and low and behold it worked perfect, no latency, perfect sound.

[portessa]

I need to study this video extensively so I can record MainStage in either Reason 6 or Pro Tools 10 as they are what I use most.