Carambel said:
I could bump all my songs into complete wave files and just mix them like that, but i wanna play my songs along the timeline to actually play live.
There is quite a lot of stuff you can do. The most intuitive thing would be, instead of rendering your songs into just single wav files each, rendering them into the kinds of components you wish to improvise with during your live set. You will find this to be very efficient; buying a hardware sampler/sequencer to separately transfer your sounds into would only be redundant if you're already working in an environment which makes this possible. By the way, what do you mean
exactly when you say you "want to play your songs along the timeline to play live"?
It sounds like you're producing songs in Ableton Live in the traditional linear way and then want to mix those song projects as-is in realtime. In all fairness, Ableton Live is extremely live performance friendly; after all, you're now talking about actually mixing whole DAW projects live with one another without any fundamental limitations. To this date live performance hasn't been possible in this manner on a single computer running one DAW application, and there isn't a single package currently on the market which would do that.
Genuinely mixing whole DAW project files on the fly within a single application running on one computer would require the sequencer application to take care of the different MIDI/audio routing schemes in every project currently being mixed. Different and overlapping controller assignments in each project file would also be a major issue. If one tried to mix song projects which needed to use the same piece of outboard gear at the same time, well, it would naturally only make things practically impossible. Also, if your projects were heavier on the computer resources than 50% of any single resource type consumed at a given moment (half of the available CPU power, half of the available memory, half of the maximum HD throughput), even if the application took good care of the routing and controller schemes, you still would not be able to run even two of such projects simultaneously, still not even considering the overhead caused by actually constantly loading and initializing different project files and their components to be mixed.
Simplifying things a bit (yes, I know there are people who do all kinds of crazy things live
), what ever DAW software you use to produce your songs and actually finish a song with, in a traditional fashion, having the tune laid out in a linear project file containing the full routing scheme (software/outboard), VST instruments and effects, individual audio tracks and controller assignments -- then you're indeed dealing strictly with production. What ever you do when you're on the stage and throw that same tune in a live set, especially if you're using a single computer, you should not be dealing with the exact same linear project file but something you have prepared specifically with the live situation in mind -- and Ableton Live gives you much power in this department indeed.
So, although Live gives you much more freedom for live situations than a traditional linear sequencer, these rules still apply for the above reasons. In version 5 you can in fact even merge different project files, but that operation is still intended for production and preparation of live sets, not actual on-stage live merging.
