DP Looping Sections of Multitrack During Live Show

[wesdrums]

Hi, Forgive me if this is a dumb question. Say I have a set of multitracks, each song is in a Chunk, then I take those chunks make a DP "song" arrangement for a seamless song-set. The catch is let's say in this giant set arrangement, I'd like several segments to loop continuously until they are broken out of with a MIDI foot pedal? So for example, let's say you play through song 1, it fades in to the count in of song 2 and then the intro loops continuously until the singer is done introducing the song at which time a foot pedal is pressed and the loop finishes it's current repeat and goes into verse 1 plays through the arrangement to lets say some sort of audience sing along bridge, when it gets here it again repeats the bridge segment over and over until the foot pedal is again pressed, then plays out the rest of the song transitioning in to song 3 etc...

What is the right way to do this? I was hoping clips in DP10 might do what I want, but it doesn't seem to really work well for this. You can't have things at various tempos, and you can't seem to have 1 shot (non-looping) parts and you can't set scenes to auto-advance.

I've tried "Insert Loop" on the multi track sections, and while this does indeed loop, I can't, for the life of me, get it to break out of the loop to the next section. (This is all in the sequence window)

Is what I'm trying to do even possible? You could do it with memory cycle I guess, but that only let's you have one loop section (as far as I know) and I'm the drummer so I can't go and reset loop points during the song.

Any thoughts?

-Wes

EDIT: Just for clarification, all of these loop points would be pre-determined, not on-the-fly, just how many times they repeat before advancing would be the on-the-fly part.

[dix]

I'm not sure if all, or any of this is possible with DP, but if it were it would be via OSC commands. Probably not via MIDI. DP has extensive OSC capabilities, but I don't know if it does the operations you're asking about.

I do recall wanting to have a multitrack Chunk play for an undetermined amount of as walk-in music for a performance installation and then have it crossfade into another Chunk. That is definitely not possible, via OSC or otherwise. As I recall you can advance Chunks via OSC, but there's a lag while the Chunk loads. The workaround in that situation was to have the walk-in music playing in a different OSC capable app and using OSC to crossfade between it and DP

[wesdrums]

Just an update on this, it doesn't seem possible to do this stock, but I managed to piece together a few puzzle pieces and get it to work. It's not perfect, but it does what I need for now. Though I did put in an official feature request. We'll see!

To anyone interested, this can be done if you rewire DP as the master to Ableton 10 (yes it needs to be 10 because 9.x disables control surfaces when in rewire slave mode) and install Clyphx Pro as a control surface in Ableton (it's just a software extension). You basically set markers in Ableton's arrangement view where you want your loop points to start and how long you want them + turn loop/memory cycle on via Clyphx Pro X Cues in the Marker name, like "[] loop 4B; loop on" it will then enable a 4 bar loop that starts at the markers location in Ableton and Digital Performer simultaneously and turn looping/memory cycle on once the playhead rolls over that marker.

One gotcha I've come across, is though you are supposed to be able to set the loop lengths to whatever you need to, when it's rewired in to Digital Performer, it seems to get pissed and behave erratically if the loop points aren't the same length as whatever the first one was you set. So if you set your first one as 4 Bars, the rest seem to need to all be 4 Bars to keep it happy. In anycase, hopefully MOTU will add some sort of looping event to the conductor track and that can setup/move around memory cycle points in the chunk. It would solve all sorts of update/change headaches and stuff.


If you are like me and initially encounter audio dropouts when engaging/disengaging memory cycle, this can be fixed by going to Setup > Configure Audio System > Configure Studio Settings and increasing the "Prime Milliseconds" number from it's default, I've tried both 250ms and 500ms and they both seem to fix it.

-W