My Complaint With the Direction of Live.

[Division Monarchy]

While I appreciate the new update, I just got to say one thing, please stop with the M4L devices as new features. M4L is buggy, slow, CPU heavy, and over rated. Please, how about taking some of its useful components like LFO and other plugins and make them native?

M4L is nowhere near as stable or efficient as Live, and I feel like as a user of Live I am being pushed in the direction of a piece of software that I find to be buggy and not user, or system friendly.

I don't care that M4L provides this great, open source programming environment, because I get no use out of it with its overall clunkiness. I do care to see Ableton put more into their own native plugins again and to stop leaning on M4L development.

[pencilrocket]

If it were as stable as native devices m4l would have called native devices
What if reason rack extension were buggier than VST?

[Division Monarchy]

Bottom line for me is I would never trust it to use in a live setting and I feel uninspired to use it in the studio.

I want Ableton to veer away from releasing stuff on this platform and keep things native. Paid or free upgrades being a moot point, plugins like LFO, Convolution Reverb should exist natively in Live at this point.

If M4L works that great for you, then that is fine. Personally, I find it to be the most unstable software I ever owned and I really don't like Ableton using it as a crutch.

Besides, you can't run M4L in Rewire. They really did not do a good job with the integration.

[störgeräusche]

i have several M4L devices in my live set and i never had any problems on stage... 20+ gigs and never one crash.

[deva]

Bottom line for me is I would never trust it to use in a live setting and I feel uninspired to use it in the studio.

I want Ableton to veer away from releasing stuff on this platform and keep things native. Paid or free upgrades being a moot point, plugins like LFO, Convolution Reverb should exist natively in Live at this point.

If M4L works that great for you, then that is fine. Personally, I find it to be the most unstable software I ever owned and I really don't like Ableton using it as a crutch.

Besides, you can't run M4L in Rewire. They really did not do a good job with the integration.

You can ask for what you want... but Ableton is committed to M4L. And they will continue to make integration better, make it more stable, and efficient. Ableton isn't using it as a crutch, they are creating an environment that lets users create the tools the want. That is their vision.

[chapelier fou]

M4L crashes a lot when editing.
But i just made one year of tour without any problem with 2 or 3 custom devices in my sets.

[kleine]

@Division Monarchy

Generally: You don't have to use M4L if you don't like it - therefore we have a Live standard edition.
If M4L would not exist, Live would look pretty much the same as of now (of course minus M4L). For many users and artists, M4L is a godsend and they build their whole musical universe around it/with it.
I'm working hard on making 'clunkiness' go away, so at some point will not be able to tell the difference anymore between C++ code and Max code.. (if there would be no edit button that is...).

Best,
C

[Michael Hatsis]

If M4L would not exist, Live would look pretty much the same as of now (of course minus M4L). For many users and artists, M4L is a godsend and they build their whole musical universe around it/with it.


Best,
C

i dont know if that is totally true. if there was no such thing as mfl we might have a native LFO and other modulation decives by this point. instead we have an mfl device- that if i use it, there is no guarantee that if and when i open up that set say 6-12 months from now that everything will still be mapped and the controls will be how i left them. One thing i refuse to do is to lose work, and i have been stung so many times w mfl. so for me mfl is unusable.
also, lots of resources go into developing and updating mfl. resources that could be spent on vanilla Live

[kleine]

I guess you have to trust me on that one
Of course, loosing work is not acceptable, so it's with the LFO and other devices as with any other devices: if you
find an issue, let us know about it and we'll fix it.

Best,
Christian

[Michael Hatsis]

I guess you have to trust me on that one
Of course, loosing work is not acceptable, so it's with the LFO and other devices as with any other devices: if you
find an issue, let us know about it and we'll fix it.

Best,
Christian

dunno,
I find it hard to believe that once we got session automation - and if there was no mfl, that there wouldn't be any native modulation devices. especially now w bitwig

[kirky_roger]

@Division Monarchy
I'm working hard on making 'clunkiness' go away, so at some point will not be able to tell the difference anymore between C++ code and Max code.. (if there would be no edit button that is...).

I guess for me it's that. The "clunkiness" at the moment just doesn't give you a safe feeling using it live. And then from time to time it happens that the Convolution Reverb just doesn't load the impulse Response you saved the live-set with and now you're sitting on a Live Set with 10+ Convolution Reverbs in it, and all of them are back to their defautl setting. That sucks so bad, that it overshadows all (and there are a lot of them) positive aspects of M4L. I can see the potential of M4L and I'm looking forward to new improvements in stability and so on, but I also hope that Ableton doesn't rely sole on M4L to develop some basic Audio Effects (such as LFO's) but provides them in a native format. If at some point we won't be able to tell the difference between C++ code and Max, I change my views.

[TomViolenz]

I guess you have to trust me on that one
Of course, loosing work is not acceptable, so it's with the LFO and other devices as with any other devices: if you
find an issue, let us know about it and we'll fix it.

Best,
Christian

Easy: The LFO assigned parameter can not be controlled any more via other means

I'm not holding my breath till you solve that

Other than that a huge +10000000 for the OP

[TomViolenz]

I guess you have to trust me on that one
Of course, loosing work is not acceptable, so it's with the LFO and other devices as with any other devices: if you
find an issue, let us know about it and we'll fix it.

Best,
Christian

dunno,
I find it hard to believe that once we got session automation - and if there was no mfl, that there wouldn't be any native modulation devices. especially now w bitwig

Especially considering that the internal modulation options in Bitwig are far beyond anything I have seen cooked up in M4L!
The M4L LFO and Envelope Follower wouldn't even cut it if they were native devices!

[chapelier fou]

I guess you have to trust me on that one
Of course, loosing work is not acceptable, so it's with the LFO and other devices as with any other devices: if you
find an issue, let us know about it and we'll fix it.

Best,
Christian

Easy: The LFO assigned parameter can not be controlled any more via other means

I'm not holding my breath till you solve that

Other than that a huge +10000000 for the OP

might be easily changeable but would need to replace live.remote by live.object and would pollute the undo history.

[TomViolenz]

I guess you have to trust me on that one
Of course, loosing work is not acceptable, so it's with the LFO and other devices as with any other devices: if you
find an issue, let us know about it and we'll fix it.

Best,
Christian

Easy: The LFO assigned parameter can not be controlled any more via other means

I'm not holding my breath till you solve that

Other than that a huge +10000000 for the OP

might be easily changeable but would need to replace live.remote by live.object and would pollute the undo history.

I'd say that makes mine and the OPs point pretty well.

I's overall a sub par solution.

Sure leave M4L in for the people who use it, but for the regular users Ableton needs to focus everthing else on native devices.

We need no freaking LFOs that need an extra program to run and even in the best of cases don't have full functionality.

We need light weight and absolutely stable tools for making music.
Like Lives native devices for example.