Ableton Forum

I couldn't verify this but I had a conversation with a pretty well known artist/ableton user about the status of Live 10
and he was saying that Ableton has sub-contracted the coding of Live 10, almost from the ground up, while Ableton is keeping busy
with dropping little updates for live 9x and will do so for some time (that I know for a fact).
The reason being the core code of Live is too weak and complicated to fix and/or update.

Honnestly if this is true, I.M.O this could be the best news/move ever.

taking a brillant scenario and instead of trying to do it all themselves they're handing a brillant scenario to some brillant
director who will make it all solid

yeah, everything about that scenario is really believable .

"Excuse me 'code director', our code is 'weak' can you fix it for us because we don't know how"



Holy shit.

I'm currently sub contracting out the sub-contract that Ableton gave me.... My plasterer knows a bit about music so he said he'll do a bit for me...

Cheers
D

The core code has been hitting the gym and working out, it's not weak at all.

Grill Pheiss wrote:

AliMc wrote:Personally, I'm quite happy with them adding new features and updates to Live 9 for free.
A lot of other daws require far more regular payments to keep up to date.
In my opinion Live 9 has progressed quite nicely since it was released without Ableton asking us for any more cash (except for Push of course).

right! and Live just requires a small contribution a.k.a PUSH so that the updates are actually relevant to you

Dual monitor support, SoX sample rate conversion, Tuner (which we use here in literally every single set), latency compensation, RMS meters, the Cytomic filters, Ableton Link (we link iOS stuff with Supercollider in Linux!), the Max for Live Essentials brand new devices... the list goes on. One does not need Push in order to use any of that and we all got those plus tons of fixes for free.
Ableton's commitment to Live 9 shows that we are in for a treat whatever and whenever comes next.

Angstrom wrote:Live 10 Pre-Review : Feature breakdown (Telepath Edition)

Live 10s features can be broken down into 4 main categories

1. Features that are great, just what you wanted, Amazing!
2. Features you never wanted, and can't really understand why it's there.
3. Features you wanted, but differently. You feel the pain of what might have been.
4. Features you'd never even thought of, but here they are. Sort of interesting. potentially

the percentages for each may swing your way if you pray to the gods of software development in the centercode suggestions section

To be honest if you believe this forum everything will be 2.

aschneider wrote: Ableton's commitment to Live 9 shows that we are in for a treat whatever and whenever comes next.

I think it might be more accurate to say "Live 8 and Live 9 both show that we are in for a real treat by the time version X.5 is released!"

Live 9.01 was raw hell for me (Bugs, clicks pops on GUI actions, CPU surges, etc.) and it was only by the later point versions the bugs were ironed out, some useful features were added, and it all started to work a bit better. By 9.6 it's nearly as stable as V8 was.

So I'm really curious about what V10 will bring, but I know that it will be painful until V10.5.

Angstrom wrote:
So I'm really curious about what V10 will bring, but I know that it will be painful until V10.5.

So it's your contention what you described about v9 is planned and deliberate?

Er, not sure where you got that from. Its a weird thing of you to say.

Explain to me where I said it was "planned and deliberate"

It's my "contention" that despite all their best intentions and efforts there will be bugs relating to new features which will only be noticed once the software has a wide installbase. And many of these bugs will take months or even years to chase down and eliminate. Some of those bugs will be brutal. For some users the early versions will be nearly impossible to use.

That's not guesswork, thats what actually happened. Its what happens with all software.
And I participated all the way throught the beta of L9, but it still took about 3 years for many of the issues to be identified and fully adressed. That's just the way it is. I'm sure they'd love to realease flawless software just like anyone ... but its not possible.

Many people thought L8 was buggy as hell, but I was one of the fortunate ones where it always worked flawlessly for me. Just luck really. Even 8.01 worked great for me!
Unfortunately it swang the other way for me in L9 ... where I got all the bugs, it was just awful.
It was the very worst experience I've ever had with ableton software and it continued. In the first year it was almost unusble. In the second year it was merely clicky and jumpy. In the third year it started to calm. And now in the 4th year it all works pretty much as intended, other than a few small issues regarding authorisations and loading times.

That's what I expect this time around too. With Live 10 a small group will have a hellish time. If I am lucky and fall into the "it all works great for me" group again, I will be deleriously happy. L9 was a nasty wake up call for me.

Angstrom wrote:Er, not sure where you got that from. Its a weird thing of you to say.

Explain to me where I said it was "planned and deliberate"

This was implied I think as you expect a pattern to be repeated.

Angstrom wrote: That's not guesswork, thats what actually happened. Its what happens with all software.

Nope, this only happens when a development team doesn't learn from its mistakes or if what you describe is intentional to the development model.

You seem to be assuming that the Ableton team is to remain static in its response and doesn't want to study nor apply modern application development methodology. I don't think that's what we have seen the last two years. Here's for hope.

Otherwise I agree that 9.0.x was quite bad. "Contention" was tongue in cheek but that doesn't translate well. My apologies. Thanks for your intelligent response.

Angstrom wrote:

yeah, everything about that scenario is really believable .

"Excuse me 'code director', our code is 'weak' can you fix it for us because we don't know how"



Holy shit.

I had the same reaction at first!

but it made sense.

what he said was prior to 9 the amount of problems was quite stagerring and changing/adding core features that had been overlooked
on early versions like full pdc was apparently extremelly challenging, and is at best a big complex workaround that has a
significant impact on cpu usage.

I think ableton made even a video that mentions the whole 8 to 9 fixfest that was undertaken some time ago -

So if they were to offer an optimized and fluid version of all the fixes they've implemented, they would HAVE to start from scratch all over again and
that meant completelly focusing on 10 while dropping updates and tuning for 9x wich they obviously can't do. so the foundations of 10 is
(again apparently...........) been done outside of ableton

Anyway true or not I think it's reasonable to expect a lot of optimisations in 10

fingers crossed

Nah, I'm still not buying it.
The idea of a "total rewrite" is one of those weird ideas which keeps coming up. Its a figment of imagination, what happens in reality is - code has dependencies, some of them are botch jobs, over time you unfuck eack of those and create an audit process which hopefully present that happening again. Ableton did all that during the creation of L9 when they went Agile, and I believe that L9 was a bit lumpy because their process wasnt yet mature.
However - the outcome was (we can assume) a more robust and modern codebase. It had issues in its teenage years but the changes made are now stable.

Many of the old rumors of "total rewrite" came from an old post by robert about the difficulty of fixing PDC, and adding session automation recording. He stated that it would need a major effort. Unfortunately these went into the collective unconscious. The major effort was obviously completed in L9 : delivering automation and automation PDC. In addition many other fixes were put in place regarding resource allocation.
I'm extrapolating from outcomes here.

So would Ableton just hack all that in place? Disregarding their new work practices they just ram new features onto an old unstable framework?
Would they throw away all of their work and outsource a new version to some magically omniscient 3rd party dev team?

If only life was that easy!
Life just doesn't work that way.

Outsourcing discrete individual projects (such as Link, or an iOS app) is possible because parameters and endpoints can be defined, but remaking giant applications like Live from the ground up to be "better" is a bizarre daydream. Look at Bitwig, which surely had a very similar intention. Is that flawless? Even commenting charitably we can say No.

Remaking something from the ground up is the kind of happy unicorn-land fiction an experienced dev would recognize as a dream.
Regarding bugs - All you do is swap one set of familiar issues for some new unfamiliar issues.
Regarding user satisfaction? Users resent old features being removed, and they resent new features being implemented in a different way than they are used to. The "flavour" changes, the "brand value" is lost.
And when the shit hits the fan if you outsource all your company future is gambled on an external dev team? Oh My!

You think Ableton want to put their whole future in the hands of contractors? Paying endless commission fees to fix issues, for eternity.

No, way.

At least I hope not, because otherwise we are in for a massive clusterfuck

Angstrom wrote: You think Ableton want to put their whole future in the hands of contractors? Paying endless commission fees to fix issues, for eternity.

No, way.

At least I hope not, because otherwise we are in for a massive clusterfuck

To strengthen this case look at the development of professional video app Final Cut Pro X, released in 2011. AFAIU this was a rewrite of at least many parts. That brought with it dropping many features compared to the previous Final Cut Pro, not adding to existing in that. This took years to evolve back on track to something useful for Pros. In the mean time quite a few users abandoned FCP completely.

While I can see Ableton asking external developers to do specific parts — much like how Cytomic have done filters and EQ8 — I don't see them subcontracting the whole app for that.

The rewrite theory comes around every year, and for every DAW. It never happens, as Amstrong states: just fantasies.

Angstrom wrote:don't submit suggestions into the beta forum of Centercode., do it into the Suggestions section of Centercode.
on the sidebar where it says "Feedback" click "suggestions".

Also don't submit anything just yet, instead go the suggestions section and use the search box. Vote up anything that looks similar to what you want. That has a much greater chance of success than you submitting a variant on a popular wish. Popular pressure is more likely to be considered.

the most popular on there at the moment are Grouping in a Group, Edit multiple Midi clips, in-clip audio editing, ...

the search will bring up a bunch of things related to your potential submission, but if it doesn't you should submit it anyway. I suspect that an amazing suggestion with 5 votes is still likely to get considered.

Forgive my stupidity. I just signed up at Centercode because I was interested in looking at the suggestions that had already been submitted, but I can't find "Feedback" or "Suggestions", only a "Contact us" option.