Life by XLN Audio

The Lounge Other Gear
#21

Ableton Note already does that for $6!

Note – an iOS app for forming new musical ideas | Ableton

Sample your environment

Create your own sounds and kits by recording up to 60 seconds of audio into Note’s Percussion Sampler and Melodic Sampler using your phone’s microphone. Cut, filter, repitch or add audio effects to transform your sampled sounds.

Ableton Cloud

Send your Note Set to Live using Ableton Cloud. Open your project in Live’s browser and pick up where you left off with all your sounds, samples and effects in place.

Then just use Live or any of the 100s of MAX devise that perform this trick.

5 Likes
#22

Good point!

#23

…no big fuzz here, since any monetyzation issues due to actual copyright laws will see it’s own downfall, sooner than later, in these upcoming days of all sorts of ai all over the places anyways…

call me oldfashioned, i still prefer to work/create offline…my work computers only go online for dedicated updates, from time to time…manually…that eases my mind for too many good reasons…

so, including any apps into my workflow, that forces me to be online anytime i’d like to use them, is pretty much a no go…

xo became a huuuge element of my workflow…and their latest product also would have a great chance to become part of my daily toolbox, if it only offer any option that not includes any cloud treatment always upfront…

and from looking at it’s set of overall functionality, i don’t see any real reason, why it would need any online “ai” analytics each time and again to just do it’s thing, any hidden “magic” that could not be implemented right into the app all on it’s own and in first place…

if u got it in use already, enlighten me, do u see any real set of tools, that needs any essential/additional online processing to make it work the way it works…?..i mean, end of the day, this is nothing but another fancy audioslice remangler…don’t see any needs for cloud and ai buzzwords to be involved here…

and maybe someone must tell them, as long there’s no real next level advantage for use of ai, it became more of a marketing killer to modern music gear lately, than a booster…
and if i look at synplant2, which takes big and truly new advantages from “ai”, more like deep machine learning, there’s is no such thing that forces u to be online to just use it’s full set of functionality…and this plugin really creates soundalike synthvoices from existing audio…
while life just get fed with audio to spit out slices of that same audio to regroove that content in various ways…

apart from the fact, that there are many ways to get results like this in bitwig and ableton anyways already, i still remember me, making heavy use of some old ios app more than a decade ago, where u could do pretty much the xact same thing life promises…it was a cheap one time purchase app running on ipads and iphones, that never needed any further “online help” to just spit out endless variations, on various rhytmical grids and metrics, from that point on, u just recorded something with it…hmmmm…xln, ur a great company…but what’s this all about…i wonder…

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#24

I just created a rule for Hazel on my Mac to automatically copy any incoming WAVs from the iCloud-synced recording app Just Press Record. It puts them into a folder in my Live user library.

And sometime recently Just Press Record added stereo recording on compatible iPhones. Done! Stereo field recordings that will already be in Ableton before I ever get home.

3 Likes
#25

Yes, it’s something I do all the time. I use Koala constantly with my phone to collect sounds and make rhythms (and also with Polyend Tracker) and I’m very happy with it and if I like a sample I move it to my PC.

I’m not being negative about XLN Life, I’m just pointing out that considering it’s $90 it doesn’t really hold enough value to me for saving me from the workflow step of moving the files to Bitwig.

As others have pointed out I think Ableton users already have this via the Ableton app (which I haven’t tried)

So in summary I think it sounds cool and I hope it does well, but it doesn’t tempt me to try it.

#26

Had a play with the demo…

So while I’ve been working from home, I purposefully recorded a dozen or so snippets of just random shit. Me talking on a Teams call (don’t tell my employer :grimacing:), the dog getting excited for walkies, me hitting random shit with a pen, etc, etc. App sync is very smooth and it flows through to the app impressively quickly in my opinion.

It initially left me very impressed to be honest. There was one random beat that was using my dogs nails on the wooden floor almost like a shaker/hat and his yelps were pitched into other rhythmic sounds - very cool and would have taken me ages to get there myself. And the randomise is varied enough for beats and things - at least with how I’d use it.

But, the initial impressiveness wore off a little and for the hour or so I was playing with (admittedly while still trying to work…), things did have a tendency to sound a little samey. Whatever Life does, it tends to take very short snippets from the transients - which can be adjusted manually to suit - so that the initial “suggestions” kind of end up sounding pretty similar. In a way, you could record just 1 12 second wav file and what it would immediately chuck out dozens of times wouldn’t sound that different from any other 12 second wav you chucked in there.

I’m going to play with it some more though as it sort of fits my flow. Koala’s been mentioned and I just don’t get on with it all that much. Ableton Note too which for me, involves added steps vs Life. I get why users of Koala/Ableton would not be all that enamoured by it but for ease, I see the potential. I’d rather play with Life than XO to be honest.

#27

I’m looking forward to trying Life. It costs nothing to have experience with the thing before forming my opinion.

XLN has a proven track record so I give them the benefit of doubt.

Currently, I use iCloud+, Siri (shortcuts), voice memo and Loopmix by Audiomodern to accomplish something that sounds similar to what Life seems to do but without trying it, that’s an assumption.

If it offers something unique or even does what I’m doing better or more efficiently—a note is pretty cheap for Lifetime use. Cerainly better than a subscription. My current workflow mentioned above requires a premium iCloud account which costs significantly more than Life over time by itself before mentioning the price of the other apps.

#28

Hope they make a cinnamon variant as well. OG Life is a little to bland for my liking!

#29

Just try it for ‘long enough’ and you may see the same few pre-programmed rhythms just applied to different sounds at the same places, the variable coming from different samples (juts sliced on transients). If this is enough for you then you may like it…just doesn’t seem ‘enough’ to me…some of the results sound good- but honestly slice any sample up on transients and play midi drum pattern to trigger it- same results! Serato actually does this better on both drums and pitched material. The Future of Sampling - Serato Sample - VST/AU Plugin

#30

I took the same couple of loops earlier and imported them into Life, Loopmix and Looperator (Sugar Bytes)… all gave very different results… I was particularly surprised how different Life and Loopmix are/were.
The more I get familiar with Life, the more I see it’s potential… when you get into Edit mode and see what the controls are doing to the 4 sequencer tracks, it starts to make more sense and you can see how to control it more, rather than it being a series of random hits to get something interesting.
The Density and Syncopation functions, automated within a track, will be interesting.

2 Likes
#31

This honestly doesn’t seem like a problem to me. Record the audio, slice it up and rearrange the slices. Not really any different than working with a drum break in theory, and most of my favorite music uses the same handful of breaks chopped up and rearranged.

#32

Exactly, it isn’t a problem or new, most DAWS can do it (as can my Digitakt!)

#33

I do this all the time with my MPC and in Ableton… it’s completely different in Life so far IMO… it would be completely doable in the MPC or Simpler/Sampler, but I would definitely not go in the same direction that Life has been taking me. That’s what I’m liking about it.

(PS… I think the name ‘Life’ sucks though tbh… :smiley:)

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#34

This!

I have so many field recordings on my phone and have it mind to do something with them when I get back to the studio. Then never transfer the recording to the computer/sampler. Days go by and days go by…

When you said here is what most interests me about the plug-in. With the bonus of turning my field recordings into something useful

#35

I’ve been testing Life quite a while now.

The wow factor got me good.
Recording everything, anything, and yielding usable rhythm is quite useful.

I, for one, spend a lot of time recording stuff into my phone. And when I end up using it, I usually spend quite some time preparing the samples for my DAW or sampler.

Granted, Life isn’t quite the do-it-all and can’t quite replace your drummer or anything.
But I’m pretty sure XLN will, at some point, try to integrate both Life and XO to one another.
Which, I gotta say, would be crazy good.

Both products share the same design, so it would make sense.

I really thought, at first, that this would be gimmicky. But it proved useful way more than I thought.
Throwing many different sources is a hit or miss. But when it’s a hit, it does hit home instantly.

Just my take, just my taste.
But first time I used it, I ended up thinking « where was that thing when I was 15 yo »?

2 Likes
#36

That’s an over simplification, did you actually use it?

It feels like a moot point to me. You could use the same argument for pretty much any VST on the market – hey did you know that you can just rebuild this in an Ableton rack? It’s not going to have the same interface and feature set, but what about Max for live? Still won’t be the same thing so why not program your own VST, iOS app, and cloud system?

Or why not take it further, why pay for Ableton when you can just program your own DAW? Or why not build your own computer and operating system?

I’m not saying everyone needs this, that’s up to you to decide. But I think it’s pretty cool.
If you can build complex devices in Ableton, that’s awesome! I think it’s great that there are many ways to create tools and music!

3 Likes
#37

Yes, I used it for serval hours (I have a lot of their stuff- XO drum etc) and wanted to like it, from the pictures I thought it had some sort of AI Euclidian drum engine (wat the point of that graphic?) looking for peaks and making new patterns based on the source sample. Probably spoilt with things like Synplant 2!

For me it It doesn’t do anything useful, it applies a pre-set to a chopped sample, Personally I don’t need a VST for this but I appreciate others may find it useful, maybe even $100 useful.

#38

Ok - just did some comparisons with the same field recording I made through the phone app.

Life
Sting!64
Mono Sequencer
Live Simpler - slice by transient

Life is way more musical than Sting and Mono Sequencer. By music I mean techno/house music

Obviously you can put in the work to make your own sequencer chains with FX, pitch, etc…

1 Like
#39

I predict sample pack makers will be happy :slight_smile: with this one

#40

I get it, it’s 100% cool that it’s not for you.
However, it isn’t true that the only thing it does, is to apply a preset to a chopped sample. But I don’t have the time or energy to make a list of features that are outside of that :slight_smile:

1 Like