I'm on 7 what advantages for Live 9

[Henry Robinett]

I haven't been using Live a lot. I'm launching a new band after my new CD is doing pretty well. I want to supplement the live band performance with LIve, again. I did it a few times. It's a lot of work, at least to initially set it up. But my real questions now are -

I have Live 7. What are the main advantages to upgrade to 9? I think 7 was 32 bit addressing? 9 has got to e 64? I have two MacPros for my home studio Quad 3.46, 32 GB. OSX 10.10.5 Yosemite. All my music applications are 64 in my primary DAW.

I'm on Mac. I will also need to get a new, used, cheap MacBook. Advise there is also welcome.

Thank you!

[Henry Robinett]

Let me just clarify - I'm not interested in plugins so much in terms of performance. Anything is possible, but Live is not and probably will not be my main DAW. I plan on porting over tracks done in DP, or maybe recorded directly into LIVE. But 95% of the time they will be real instruments. Guitars, piano and more than likely real percussion.

Is there an advantage or reason I need to go to Live 9? I've looked and I don't see anything, or haven't yet found in the search.

[Tarekith]

If you're just plain tracking and nothing else, I'm not sure a lot has changed other than the move to 64bit. The EQ8 and compressor were upgraded graded and are MUCH nicer sounding, and some of the warp modes were tweaked to be better sounding. Not sure how much editing and/or timestretching you're going to be doing, so maybe that's not important to you.

[jlgrimes]

I haven't been using Live a lot. I'm launching a new band after my new CD is doing pretty well. I want to supplement the live band performance with LIve, again. I did it a few times. It's a lot of work, at least to initially set it up. But my real questions now are -

I have Live 7. What are the main advantages to upgrade to 9? I think 7 was 32 bit addressing? 9 has got to e 64? I have two MacPros for my home studio Quad 3.46, 32 GB. OSX 10.10.5 Yosemite. All my music applications are 64 in my primary DAW.

I'm on Mac. I will also need to get a new, used, cheap MacBook. Advise there is also welcome.

Thank you!

64 bit is probably the biggest reason. You can now make good use of more than 4 gb of ram.

Also Live 9 has full PDC now for automation.

If you are on Suite Max4Live is a big one.

Another thing Ableton did was replace the Session Overdub button with a Session Record button. Not everyone like this but I like it because you can just bind that to one key and use that to Start recording in any clip slot.

Ableton's new Browser has some good points as you can now have as many locations as you want. live has to initially scan them first though which can take some time.

Was it 7 or 8 that redid warping. It is a different workflow now. It is a little easier to learn now.

The midi editing is better now. Pattern duplicate button is a huge timesaver alone.

[Henry Robinett]

Thank you! I'd love nicer sounding time stretching! And 64 bit is important.

[Angstrom]

If you are essentially importing stems to clips it may be worth using the L9 demo for a while. I think they provide a demo key which unlocks all functionality for a month, if I remember correctly.

The reason I say this is - few things changed in L9 which were less than optimal, depending how you work. For instance - from around 9.01 to 9.5.x I had some nasty crackling on the outputs because of changes to the way they attempted to fix resource allocation on inactive devices. In more recent builds these issues have been eliminated one by one, but some still remain. 99% of users never encountered the issue, but it was there.

So for weird issues such as that Depending on how you use Live you should try the demo. You will either say "I don't hear anything wrong, in fact everything is much better!" Or you will be saying "holy shit what is happening, why is X not working and Y making clicking noises, and did they remove Z!! ".
It depends how you operate.

Try the demo