I'm admittedly still learning all there is to learn about Ableton Live (I suspect there are folks who've been using it for years and still, to this very day, find interesting ways to make it do what they want) but I've spent a fair bit of time playing with it, and reading forums on this and other sites, and I've already started thinking, "You know what would be REALLY cool......"
So here, for your amusement and hopeful inclusion, is my list of suggestions / feedback. Enjoy!
(BTW - Some of these may already exist, or maybe I'm not grokking The One True Way, so I certainly welcome any and all comments.)
- Being able to "Visually Overlap" two clips to see where/how their beats line up. (Think "Photoshop Layers" with 50% opacity. This would probably mean having a fixed Time Grid, but a "stretchy" sample waveform -- maybe dragable warp markers for Track 'A' ABOVE the waveforms and dragable markers BELOW the display for Track 'B'...)
- Being able to double click a clip's BPM, say, to set the global tempo to that value. (This one's just a litte thing which would be nice to have.)
- EQ Histograms! I would *KILL!* for a nice frequency spectrum; it would SO help me figure out where to set my EQs! (And, similar to the Visual Overlap above, seeing the spectra[?] of two or more clips/tracks overlaid on top of each other -- both before and after filtering -- would be FREAKIN' SWEET!)
- I'm probably missing something obvious... Is there a way to set an "End Marker" to stop playback in Arrange Mode?
- I'm on a Mac, but I DO have a two-button+scroll wheel mouse. I'd like to be able to turn knobs and sliders using the scroll wheel (i.e., hover over a Track Volume or Transpose dial and scroll up or down to increase/decrease the value -- ala Traktor.) I saw something like this for the PC, can I do it on my Apple G5?
- Also, having two buttons, I wish more things were on the Context Menu -- "Split [Cmd-E]", for example, seems like a logical Context Menu item, in addition to being under the standard Edit menu at the top of the screen/window.
- Is this a bug? If I 'Copy' a clip from Session View, then 'Paste' it into Arrangement View, I can't "Rename" it in the arranger. But if I start recording, then launch the clip, I can go back into the arranger and rename it just fine.
- The single 'Save' button down in the clip's settings (after painstakingly warping a given song) scares me; I keep thinking I'm going to accidentally save a clip with a loop in it -- or some other funky setting -- and it will persist that to that song's "main" ASD file. I'd argue there should be some sort of "Save Clip As..." menu option (in the "File" Menu *AND* Context Menu, of course!)
- Other people have mentioned things like being able to set colored warp markers (or other flags) within a song, and I agree. Also, and this may just be something I haven't figure out yet, being able to assign keys/MIDI to playback at those exact points -- without having to create a new clip -- might be nice. Not that clips are bad, mind you [they're fundamental to using Live, I know] but after a while they start to take up valuable real estate on a "measly", er I mean slender 12-inch PowerBook.
- One other request I know you won't support is being able to populate the ID3 BPM field of my MP3s for me, or at least allow me to access that information programmatically. That makes me sad...
- Other Mac "foibles" -- F11 for Full-Screen Mode interferes with the default settings for Expose. (Other apps use "Cmd+Shift+F") Also, once I'm IN Full-Screen Mode, there's no way to get to the main menus. (And it took me a long time to realize that the little yellow pixel in the bottom right of the screen got me back OUT of Full-Screen Mode.) One thing I'm glad you DON'T copy from the Mac OS X design is clicking twice slowly on a clip to rename it. THAT bugs the heck out of me!
Other than that I must once again commend you on a superb product! The degree of creativity and expression Ableton Live affords me is an absolute dream come true! I look forward to spending all my free time exploring the unlimited possibilities which are now available to me.
PS - I come from a Unix/Linux background, so the idea of paying for software is unusual to me. With Ableton Live 6, however, I very happily made an exception! I guess that quite literally makes it an exceptional program! Cheers,
:- D
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:- Dabe@Gottaswing.com
:- http://www.cs.umd.edu/~dabe/music/