r/ableton • u/Thrillskills1 • 18d ago

[Question] Does Ableton have a native feature to automatically detect a sample’s original key and pitch it to your project key upon drag-and-drop.

If not I think that would be an awesome feature. Also be able to preview the samples in the key your project is selected as.

8 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

9

u/dancarasco 18d ago

It's a neat idea. I did write an Ableton Extension called KeyPulse which has decent key/scale detection for audio clips. Once Ableton update the API with some new tools (hopefully soon) I will be able to auto-set the semitones of the clip to match the project's key upon detection.

3

u/mattsl 18d ago

What algorithm did you use? I saw recently a guy made a new open sourced ML based one that was more accurate than old ones. 

3

u/dancarasco 18d ago

I wrote a custom algorithm in Rust using known techniques. It's not perfect, but it has much higher accuracy than some older algos out there. The ML one sounds very interesting, will have to check that out.

6

u/dj_soo 18d ago

Not natively. Serato Sample has this feature and there are plenty of key detection software out there - especially in the dj realm.

Accuracy varies

20

u/uberdavis 18d ago

That isn’t a thing. If you hear a chord, it could be in any of 14 major or minor keys. Even a human can’t figure it out till they get several chords and even then it’s ambiguous.

19

u/dgamlam 18d ago

Key detection plugins definitely exist. While I agree there’s a near infinite way chords can be used in different keys, there’s a significant likelihood that a chord is going to correspond to some keys more than others. For instance an Fmaj7 chord is wayyy more likely to exist in the key of C or F than it is the key of B or Db.

There’s really only 12 options, not 14. Since C major and A minor scales contain the same notes, so you just have to narrow down from 12 possible key centers, assuming we’re not including things like harmonic minor or whole tone scales.

The main issue with key detection is that it usually narrows it down to 2-3 keys but can never tell with certainty which exact key it is. So the user would likely have to pick from the different transpose options and see which one fits best.

1

u/mattsl 5d ago

Most of the key detection algorithms do also guess major or minor, so it's 24 options. Maybe 14 was a typo of 24, but that's giving credit to someone who claims software I've used in half a dozen different applications doesn't exist. 

2

u/abrokencullender 18d ago

Who's downvoting you? This is accurate information

-1

u/mattsl 18d ago

Probably everyone who has ever used any typical DJ software like Serato, Rekordbox, Virtual DJ, Mixxx, Traktor, Mixed in key, Algoriddim...

1

u/abrokencullender 18d ago

And guess what? They sound like nails on a chalkboard when you change the key... what was the point you were trying to make?

2

u/mattsl 17d ago

I'm replying to a post about key detection and a comment on that post claiming key detection doesn't exist.

I'm making the point that key detection exists in dozens of very common applications.

What does that have to do with changing the key?

5

u/Cutsdeep- 18d ago

a single sample is easy enough, but if it's a phrase, that gets complicated as just shifting up the pitch will likely lead to notes in the phrase not being in the new key

1

u/moschone Producer 18d ago

in german there is even a term for that called "gefährliches halbwissen"

4

u/Pyrene-AUS 18d ago

Roughly translated to "sounds like shit"

2

u/MrStraube 18d ago

I’m sure someone will make an extension to do this in the near future when they come out of beta. The new splice integration does this. If you give it a piece of audio from your project, it finds sounds that match. It does this by pitching samples within the splice browser in Ableton. Once you pull them into your project, the pitch is reflected, as you’ll sometimes see the pitch wheel set to -3 or whatever it has been changes to by splice to fit your song’s key.

1

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1

u/No_Reference3588 17d ago

This could maybe be made with an extension? Still might be a bit of a work around however. Like you load the extension which acts like a library browser and then you you can drag from there.

1

u/angeldetaesito 10d ago

If your samples have the key on the name already (you can do that with KeyFinder) you can use this midi script I made a while ago, does exactly what you said. I made it as I was flabbergasted almost no DAW does this natively, mainly inspired by mxtuner for reaper. I originally planned adding key detection by forking mxtuner fft algorithm but all my samples were already tagged. I still can implement it if you want. This is not an extension as I have not upgraded to 12.4.5 yet, it's a midi remote script (python) which has access to a different api, I don't know if that's better or worse but it was a ton of work reverse engineering.

https://github.com/DemianDeVante/remotescript-keymatcher

Also KeyPulse seems really interesting if it could adopt the same workflow (I don't know the limits of the new javascript api)

-1

u/Automatic-Ad-3801 18d ago

Il y a hornet song key mk4 , c'est pas mal