Hello

Hi Minigmgoit

Thanks very much for your kind words. I'd be really interested to hear from you (or anyone else) about what you feel gives AudioMulch an edge over Ableton.

Best wishes

Ross

I own (and use) both Ableton and Audiomulch. For me they are very different things, I use Ableton for straight forward laying down tracks (or fragements of tracks) and building songs, Audiomulch for experiments and soundscapes. I don't think I would want to be with out either. My favourite aspects of both:

Audiomulch -
The granular stuff is fanastic, so much better implemented than any other granular devices I have seen.
The metasurface, a great implmentation of control of multiple parameters. So easy and creative to use.
Patching - nice and easy to see what is gong on. Also Audiomulch's contraptions are at the right 'level', you can get stuff done quickly with them (as opposed to PD where is takes ages to do anything useful because the modules are so low level)
Easy on the computer - even big patches seem relatively kind to the cpu.
Its' different!

Ableton -
Session view - create clips, swop them round, play in various combinations
Racks - set up a chain of effects and stuff (not bad but I prefer patching as in audiomulch especially as a set up gets more complicated).
Ease of use for creating a song.

I use several different music environments and each has their strengths and weaknesses. I like AM because more than any other music environment it makes me feel like a painter at an empty canvas. I think I'm starting to understand why.

On one hand, with even the most boring DAW these days, you have quite a bit of routing flexibility. Even within the mixer+sends paradigm, there are probably more sonic permutations than one can explore in a lifetime. I will say that one key difference is that when you look at the signal flow in audiomulch, it's much easier to see signal splitting and combining. With the mixer+sends, it lends itself to creative signal splitting, but if you try to do complex combinations of both splitting/combining, the signal path gets very hard to keep track of (even if it is theoretically feasible using busses or routing matrices).

However, what I think is more important than the flexible routing is the instantaneous visual feedback and the ability to see multiple modules in the routing chain in an efficient way. It's this combination that turns a clever routing scheme into an instrument. Because I can see and manipulate the entire chain and their parameters instantaneously, it frees my brain to think of higher-order musical considerations - e.g. the flanger is no longer a stompbox, but a "bow" to excite some downstream resonating process.

By contrast, in a typical DAW I can certainly set up a "creative" routing scheme, but my brain has to concentrate on conceptualizing the signal flow and I can only inspect one or two pieces of the system at a time (in the form of a plugin window that takes up most of the screen). As a result, I may automate a few parameters here and there, but I have fewer brain cycles left over to conceptualize the system as an instrument.

The flipside of this is that those VST dialogs that take up most of the screen can be a bit of an impediment in AM sometimes, but oh well... there's always the slider interface (this is also one reason I often find myself reverting to native modules even when I have more powerful VST counterparts).