It depends on who or what you are trying to communicate with. It is not well adapted for communicating with a computer program because it requires too much interpretation, and it is not very useful for people that have not learned it. A program like Live needs an interface that gives the majority of potential users the greatest degree of control over the program.UnitedElectric wrote:Those who say that notation is somehow an inferior musical communication tool are clueless. Educate yourselfs. Some day you should take a glance at one of the scores of Gyorgy Ligeti or Schoenberg. Yes, music has been made easier to produce by tools like Ableton. Kind of makes you wonder how the greats ever got by right? I mean, what was all that horrid scribbling that caused the Riot of Spring?
Listen, I make elctronic music and Hip-Hop like most of the rest on this board. I also compose orchestral work but I don't kid myself by thinking I'm making 'important' music. Neither should you. That being said, notation in Ableton would be great for those of us who write for live musicians.
A musical score is only loosely coupled to the actual musical performance, which can be very different from one performance to another.
8 levels of velocity (ppp, pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff, fff) is a good enough guide for a human player who can interpret it their own way. But 127 velocity levels allowed by MIDI is barely enough to describe your exact intentions to a computer. Similar restrictions apply to the note timing.
Also the kind of scores you mention would be out of scope for all but the most advanced scoring programs.
I can't post a Ven diagram, but you can probably imagine it anyway. Draw circles for the user groups of each major DAW. Now draw the circle for all the people that would use a score editor. My guess is that their would be very little overlap for any particular DAW but more than enough users to justify the development of excellent software like Sibelius.
I would love it if some MAX genius would produce a graphical visualization tool using M4L though. Something similar to the visual scores produced by certain composers using PD. Using lines, shapes and colours to represent musical data.
Example:
http://at.or.at/hans/solitude/
Something like that would be cool.
I'm just teasing 
And Ableton just has to figure a way to interface them, vs reinventing the wheel. Unless they're down with a new wheel, of course.