I purchased SpectraLayers Elements 11 and am trying to use it with Ableton. However, despite selecting the SpectraLayers .exe as the “sample editor” in Ableton’s preferences, I still hear no sound coming from SpectraLayers when loaded with a wav file. In the preferences for it, I don’t even see a sound tab or anything to mess with audio. When I hit “play” in the transport bar, it lights up, but no music is heard and the time marker does not progress. Scrubbing doesn’t work either.
Any ideas? Did I overlook something simple or is there a problem?
Thanks in advance.
Looks like Ableton took exclusive control of your audio device, preventing other software to play audio. Is there any setting you can change on Ableton side, or in your ASIO device settings ?
You can find SpectraLayers audio settings in Edit > Preferences > Device.
Hmm, I’m not sure. I looked at my Focusrite settings and couldn’t determine anything, but may be missing something. When I go in SpectraLayers edit → preferences, the “Device” tab isn’t even there. If it was, I assume I could fix it there. No idea what to do but thanks for the suggestions.
That’s strange. Test this : close Ableton, launch SpectraLayers, check that you can see Devices in Preferences. Leave SpectraLayers open, and launch Ableton. Now when you send audio samples to SpectraLayers, it’ll use the instance of SpectraLayers that’s already opened, with the Devices settings accessible.
Let me know how it goes.
Had no idea I could even open it outside a DAW lol. The audio works that way and I seem to have full access to the program! I still can’t get it to work within Ableton, but at least this way I can still use it. Thanks so much.
Well, SpectraLayers is first a standalone app before being a plugin - actually it’s not a plugin in Ableton (since Ableton doesn’t support ARA yet), it’s just Ableton calling the standalone app.
Just to make sure, how did you call SpectraLayers from Ableton ?
Ah, it’s definitely not meant to be used that way - Ableton is supposed to detect it’s an ARA plugin and not show it, but apparently it doesn’t filter that way…
There are instructions in the manual on how to use SpectraLayers with Ableton : Ableton Live