Octatrack Set Prep

So,

I've had a hankering to do some sort of solo live electronic music this year. I have too much gear. I should put it to use even if it's just for jamming in my basement.

I have an Octatrack which I'm starting to feel comfortable with, and have developed a lil' system for handling the tedious bits of preparing sets – namely preparing, loading, and editing samples, loops, and songs for use in a performance.

Let's take a single mp3 file for example. We'll call it dubstep.mp3.

I want to play dubstep.mp3 in a live set, warped and on synced, with custom slices.

To do this you need to:

load dubstep.mp3 in Ableton
warp it
export it as wav 44.1khz
drop it onto the Octatrack
load it in a project
manually set slice points and the tempo
save it again

Only then can you use dubstep.mp3 in your performance.

1. a better way

Clearly there must be a better way. There are some things we won't trust to machines, like having the final say on what the BPM of our tracks should be (warping), but really the perfect solution would be a mechanism that mirrors how the file is interpreted by Ableton in the Octatrack interpretation. We want a transpiler.

Lucky for us, Ableton and Elektron use similar strategies for storing the sort of metadata we're after - binary files on disk. Nice! There is one problem though… … The binary formats are both proprietary.

The OT format has luckily been reverse engineered and documented long ago – I was able to write a parsing implementation for it in Rust and it works fine.

The Ableton analysis file (.asd) format hasn't however, and is completely undocumented.

As such, we can't really interop between the OT and Ableton in a seamless manner.

Octatrack Set Prep

1. a better way

1.1. HACK parsing ASD

1.2. TODO ASD <==> OT

1.3. Other tools