On second thought, I'm excited for Live 9.

[OzWozEre]

From first impressions Live 9 says to me: "quality over quantity". It's not got a huge number of super-flash new toys but it's clear that they've spent significant time rewriting the software at a basic level in order to set it up for the future, to provide a platform for the next stages of its evolution. If it's stable it'll be a triumph (after v8 that's a big 'if' of course!).

If I understand you right, you think it's O.K., to get a now better and more stable version of Live and pay extra for that.
But when you bought Live 8 you also expected it being the way it seems to be now...?!?!?!
...WOW...

I think Live 9 is marking a major milestone, a pivot-point even. Many software companies have gone belly-up trying to refactor their codebases to keep it current and/or move to 64 bit etc.

There's a reason many companies fold once they reach a certain level of legacy, it's just too damn hard to push through.

We shouldn't discount this IMO.

[su]

While there many good things to come out of Live 8, the company struggled on many fronts - the prolonged bug fixing, and the awkward handling of "share" to name just a few.

In that context, and in the face of competition from bitwig, the choices Ableton made in designing Live 9 actually reinforced my confidence in the company.

They included two big things users have been asking for for years - recording automation in session view and automation curves. While the details are out, a spec list I saw also referred to PDC as well.

The introduction of Max for Live with Live 8 didn't fully leverage the partnership IMO. It seemed like a pretty modest portion of the Live community that picked up Max. Now Max is being pushed to the masses with the inclusion in Suite. (BTW, my guess is that part of the reason why the upgrade from suite 8 to suite 9 is so expensive is the addition of max). That's a huge benefit to Live users who will now be able to take advantage of all the Max devices out there, and with a larger user base may spur even more creation of Max devices ala reaktor.

Improvements in studio effects, while not too sexy are in the spirit of strengthening the core.

Almost as important as what they did change is what they didn't change. It's still Live. I for one totally dig Live's design principles. Simple, clean, streamlined, common concepts across contexts. IMO, one of Live's greatest advantages is that it's built for speed workflow wise and none of that's changed. Contrast that with Sonar for example that's attempted to streamline workflow with X1 and X2 but is still lipstick on a linear DAW pig IMHO.

Time will tell, but I'm guessing that the long wait for Live 9 was no accident. My guess is that Ableton did a lot of soul searching after the struggles with 8 and that they're working hard to: a) be responsive to the user community (that came through from Gerhard B in the rollout video), and b) not repeat the mistakes of the past. I'd be really surprised if Live 9 was bug riddled.

[ilya.soloviev]

I bet they have something more to show us soon