What does saving content in a session mean?

jeff

I've been exploring ways for the session to save track content as well as configuration.

The concept is familiar to anyone that has used a DAW. You start the app, select a session, and
everything is restored to a prior state. The tracks are full of all those sick beats you've been tweaking, and that vocal you've been pitch correcting.

The problem I'm wrestling with is that Mobius isn't used like a DAW most of the time. It's more for improvising a live performance than capturing one. When you use it each day, you start with something new. The structure of the tracks, how you want them synchronized, etc. may be the same but what you put into them is new. When you end a "song" and move on to the next one you often just reset the tracks you've been improvising in so they won't even have anything in them to save.

This will start changing a little with MIDI tracks when they're used for pre-recorded background sequences.

So at minimum it feels like we need a way to select which tracks are saved and restored, and which ones are "live" and not saved. This could be an option you pick once and it stays that way, or it could be something that you are prompted for every time you save. LIke "You have left recorded content in tracks 1,4 and 5. Would you like this saved? [checkboxes for 1,4,5]"

For the live tracks it feels like rather than simple save/restore, it would need to be more like a "snapshot" or "version" and you could have several of them within the same session. You're improvising along and press the Snapshot button, then continue what you were doing. The next day when you load a session, it automatically loads content for the few tracks that are designated to be "static tracks" but the others are empty. Then there is a list of snapshots you've made over time that you can choose. The snapshots load things into the live performance tracks to review what you did yesterday or the day before. But you can abandon them and just return to a clean session with nothing in it but the static tracks.

I'm curious about what kinds of workflows you'd like to have here.

jeff

Another scenario, you have just one track and you've been farting around in that for an hour playing with various glitch options. You finally landed on a 5 second loop that sounds pretty cool and would like to save it. You might want to export that to a DAW to use in a more static arrangement, or use it within Mobius later as a background track. You want to keep it around, but not have to allocate a whole track just to store it. It's more like a loop or clip "library". This could be saved along with the session so it's always there, or put in a shared area that is accessible across sessions.

Mobius 2.x had crude ways to do that but it was all really just Export To File with no remembrance of where that went.

jeff

For the old Mobius users, let's approach the question from a different direction. The intent of all this is to replace/improve the old concept of the Project. What was it about Projects that you liked or didn't like. How did you use them, were they "snapshots" of a live performance toward the end of it, or were they building blocks of material you would use at the start and then evolve?

bernhard

I used the Project to save the last state of an improvisation, hoping to do something with the audio material later. I experimented with dragging all wav-files saved with the project and dropping them onto an ableton Live session. The annoying thing is that Live isn't really designed for this, because it immediately goes ahead and warps the audio to fit the bpms ...
The Mobius Project couldn't be moved to a different folder, as the .mob file contains absolute paths. This is the only difficulty I had with Mobius Projects.

It's more like a loop or clip "library".

Maybe the Browser idea could be nicked from ableton Live for this loop/clip library.