Live 9 Pricing

[mrbook]

I'm also struggling to understand the upgrade path situation (I currently own Live 8 Suite + M4L) and it has become a little worrisome to me... this is why.
If a company externally is going through extreme measures to obscure and obfuscate the simple process of paying for upgrades to its customers, what does it say about its internal policies and development practices? Is it ever going to stop or is it just the beginning?
If this is the way processes are being handled at Ableton, I can only imagine what's happening within the doors of Ableton engineering to maybe "hide bugs" and "hack code" to have something that can be sold at the expense of quality and loyal customer satisfaction.
I use Live a lot, because I feel the software itself is simple and intuitive. This sales tactic they have done is the complete opposite of simple and intuitive which really makes me question the value of what I'm about to pay for.
I really really really hope that I'm wrong on my assumption, but I have yet to see a signal from Ableton that would prove that.

[CFM]

My upgrade price is £168 - I thought OK until I read download version only...

I assume there will be an extra price for the boxed version?

A 50GB+ would take me until Live 10 to bloody download.

To be honest even £168 for an upgrade... is is a bit steep. I'm sure there will be better deals when the many 'don't bother'. £100+ for an upgrade that has not got a lot more features (audio to midi I hear is not 100% there yet) but is rather a stable version of Live 8 with a bit of GUI upgrade.

Plus other DAW's recently have reduce their prices... so I'm not sure what planet the good people at Ableton think their on and why there DAW is worth more than Pro tools @ £450 to Live Suite £599. Is Live better than the industry standard found in every commercial studio?

If you are new to live you can still get Live 8 with a free upgrade to 9 via for £379
http://www.dv247.com/computer-music-sof ... daw--63525

[re:dream]

But I suppose you're not a Suite-owner that already paid 650 for its software? Ableton's communication has been sub-par to non existing, Suite-owners were first left out, then strung along with the promise of a "special offer" for 4 months and finally received 50E discount as "special" offer. On top of that Suite-owners get 1 single week to make the decision to purchase with discount and there's no discount if they don't go all the way at all. All while newcomers or not fully upgrade Live-users get far better deals.
For comparison:
Upgrade from Live 8 Suite (650Euro MSRP) to L9 Suite = 249 Normal price, 199 "Special offer"
Upgrade from Live 8 Standard (350Euro MSRP) to Live 9 Suite = 299 Normal Price, 224 Pre-order

So, When you don't have Suite, you get 25Euro MORE discount. Even at normal prices the difference is minimal. The 300Euro you paid extra for your Suite? It's worth 50 or 25 at upgrade, and that extra business apparently has even less value to Ableton since they reward new customers with the biggest discounts.
.

Is THAT the basis of the gripe?

Look dude, I paid for suite 8, so I suppose I am in this group of supposedly hard done by people who get a smaller discount.
I honestly can't give a damn. So, someone else is going to get a bigger discount than me. Who the fuck cares?

I can see that you think the money you paid extra for Suite way back when should carry over to the present price structure. That would be nice. But I can't see how it can turn into a rock solid expectation.

I have a Toyota. A couple years back I added R 7500 in car sound and aircon. If I trade in my car, it would be nice to get the full value of the improvements I added. But that is going to be discounted. They will be worth a tenth of that on trade in. I may not like it, but it's hardly unfair. It would only be unfair if I was promised that the added features would not be discounted later. But i was not.

As for loyalty to old customers, hmmm. Ableton wants to bring in new users. What's wrong with that?

They screwed up the website, they forgot to communicate, they messed up the pricing at launch and didn't fare much better since. After 3 years of waiting and fucking with an unstable L8, and then being strung along for another 4 months, you have to put up with this crap on top of that.

Website.... communicate... I guess I never noticed. They are a small company, so I guess I am not expecting Steve Jobs in a black polo neck or a massive communications department. L8 unstable - yes, there were problems with 8.1, but they seem to have been fixed and my copy of Live has been completely solid on both my PC and my mac. So I ain't complaining.

If you have Suite and you were as excited about this upcoming release as many were, then this cattle-treatment is a cold shower.

Well, I do have Suite, and I am fairly excited about the features I am hearing about; I don't know about cattle treatment.

added all their already existing libraries and M4L, and as for M4L they claim includes 24 fantastic plugins without much explanation of what they do or how they work (thus what you actually get).

I have M4 L.The plugins are awesome.

And are there fundamentally unfixed problems with Live? Well, apart from still not having dual monitor support...

How is that a fundamentally unfixed problem? I suppose it's a matter of taste. I have never missed it.

So giving people only a single week to try out software to see if it's as problematic or not..

I don't understand. There's a time limit on their demo? Are you intending to download the Live 9 demo first?

[stringtapper]

Hey at least nobody is going to get as accidentally burned by corporate moves as this one local guy I know, who bought every embedded plug in for Logic separately right after Apple bought them, literally right before they dropped the price of Logic from $700 to $200 and included the entire package. Can't remember the actual number but it was something like $3,000.00 to $200 in a single day.

This is totally OT but I don't think it could have gone down quite like that. Logic 6 was the first Apple version and Logic 7 was priced at $1000. I know because I got the academic discount for $500. The price cut down to $200 didn't happen until at least Logic 8, which was quite a while after Apple had bought it and well after the plugins could be bought or even used individually.

[Martin Gifford]

It's hard to complain about the pricing. Ableton have added a large number of profound improvements. Just the browser and midi editor improvements would make the upgrade worth it, but they've added many more than that - EQ spectrum and pole listening, convert audio to midi, M4L, record automation in session view, improved compressors, improved arrangement stuff… I'm gasping for it! The workflow/productivity/time-saving will be awesome.

And it's not like they've taken anything away. By way of contrast, Microsoft has gotten into the bad habit of deleting features in its products, over-simplifying, making the Windows desktop into a smartphone desktop, etc. Crazy crappiness to the max. Ableton on the other hand are just adding great features and improving the quality. It's a no brainer.

If $50 extra is a problem for you at the moment, then surely you can borrow it from someone? Of course, that's assuming you really need/want the new features asap.

One off investments are worth it. If you pay $50 per week extra rent, it wipes you out, but if it's $50 extra once every few years, then it's like nothing. The pain of obsessing about fairness is not worth it.

…Just some thoughts…

[mholloway]

What's funny is how familiar this whole cycle is...Machinesworking nailed it -- we are all so predictable it's kinda scary. Live 10, cleanse fold & repeat...can't wait!

darklord-banana-guy, I really mean no offense, I'll admit I'm just a loud-mouth when it comes to expressing my opinion and I'm fully aware how absurd citing Syria was in the context of this thread. I'm the sort who will abuse the dumb priviledge of the net as a zone to just let fly when something irks me, etc. etc. With every release of Live some dozens of people get all butthurt and post paragraphs about how they've been personally wronged by Evil Ableton, which is where your post, I'm afraid, falls for me. I'm hardly as impressed with Live 9 and Ableton as you think I am -- in fact I'm eagerly awaiting to see how Bitwig plays out, specifically due to the feature set and all the stuff Live 9 lacks, of course. But I don't feel wronged, and I don't feel a need to complain -- well, aside from complaining about complainers, of course

-M

[merges]

It's hard to complain about the pricing. Ableton have added a large number of profound improvements. Just the browser and midi editor improvements would make the upgrade worth it, but they've added many more than that - EQ spectrum and pole listening, convert audio to midi, M4L, record automation in session view, improved compressors, improved arrangement stuff… I'm gasping for it! The workflow/productivity/time-saving will be awesome.

I disagree that the improvements are "profound." My understanding is that fundamental issues—like the *still* vexingly complex plugin, midi, and audio timing problems—remain, while frankly fairly incremental improvements were made to some parts of the app. Nothing earth-shattering. Push looks cool (for more money) and there are, well, lots of incremental improvements. And I like incremental improvements. But as others have pointed out, for someone who already owns Suite + M4L, those improvements look pretty meek and not worth the money—especially when they come along with, frankly, a kind of nasty middle finger from Ableton.

And to the fellow who didn't catch it, there is a one week timeframe during which us loyal customers must decide to take advantage of our teensy extra discount to upgrade.

The whole thing kind of reeks.

[ralin]

I just want to echo some of what evil-banana said an clarify the issues I see with the pricing for upgrades.

I think that the majority of people upset with the pricing are suite or suite + M4L owners. As he pointed out we are getting the smallest discount which is not necessarily a problem for everyone, but it is one for me.

In addition to that Ableton acknowledged there was an issue with pricing for suite owners and told us there would be an introductory discount. After several months they then sent an email with information saying we would be getting a $100 dollar discount when upgrading to suite 9. In actuality, we only get $35 off the price they had been quoting us for the past four months. This offer is also valid for one week only giving us no time to wait for reviews of Push to come in before deciding if we want to upgrade. This one week offer also means (I assume) that if we don't buy in the first week the price they had been quoting us for the past four months will increase by $65. I'm not planning on buying it the first week so this special offer was mainly a notification that I would not be getting a discount and that in fact my price would be increasing. I'm upset with pretty much all aspects of how this special offer was handled.

Suite also doesn't have much to offer those of us who are suite+M4L owners already. When paying for our upgrade we get the great new features of live 9, but all the suite part give us is some new sounds. On the other hand those people upgrading from 8 to suite 9 get a bunch of great instruments and max for live in addition to a better discount. A standard 8 to standard 9 upgrade is much less expensive than a suite 8 to suite 9 upgrade (I assume because I can't check) and this makes me feel like I'm paying for stuff I paid for when I upgraded to suite 8 because I'm certainly not get much from the suite part of 9.

I also want to know if this is the way things are going to be in the future because if I may not upgrade to suite this time simply so I can take advantage of the bigger discount offered for upgrading to suite 9 + suite 10 for free when the time comes around.

Had these issues not been present I may have been fine with my upgrade price. But looking at the way abelton price all live 9 upgrades I am upset with the price I am being asked to pay. It's more of a comparative thing than an issue with my price in particular.

[kitekrazy]

Some of you folks are truly a crazy lot of entitled, spoiled whiners. Jesus christ but the way you moan on and on. An expensive piece of software is soon available to upgrade; It will cost 200 bucks or so to get it, if you want it. Buy it or don't, you miserable sacks. "Cattle treatment," are you kidding me? Or maybe you should take a vacation to Syria and get some much needed perspective on your pathetic value system.

These posts always crack me up. Ableton is not an expensive piece of software but an over priced piece of software compared to what's included in other DAWs. Check out the competition sometime or continue on with your ignorant rant.

[kitekrazy]

Personally, Ableton of course have a right to charge whatever they want.
When a company charges more than what people were expecting some will complain and others will complain about the complainers.
This is especially true on dedicated forums devoted to a particular piece of software.

Welcome to the internet, it's been around for quite some time, just like this thread in some form or another.

Hey at least nobody is going to get as accidentally burned by corporate moves as this one local guy I know, who bought every embedded plug in for Logic separately right after Apple bought them, literally right before they dropped the price of Logic from $700 to $200 and included the entire package. Can't remember the actual number but it was something like $3,000.00 to $200 in a single day.

It would suck even more if he was a Logic user on a PC. $1000 for Logic and a Mac = butthurt.

[kitekrazy]

It's hard to complain about the pricing. Ableton have added a large number of profound improvements. Just the browser and midi editor improvements would make the upgrade worth it, but they've added many more than that - EQ spectrum and pole listening, convert audio to midi, M4L, record automation in session view, improved compressors, improved arrangement stuff… I'm gasping for it! The workflow/productivity/time-saving will be awesome.

And it's not like they've taken anything away. By way of contrast, Microsoft has gotten into the bad habit of deleting features in its products, over-simplifying, making the Windows desktop into a smartphone desktop, etc. Crazy crappiness to the max. Ableton on the other hand are just adding great features and improving the quality. It's a no brainer.

If $50 extra is a problem for you at the moment, then surely you can borrow it from someone? Of course, that's assuming you really need/want the new features asap.

One off investments are worth it. If you pay $50 per week extra rent, it wipes you out, but if it's $50 extra once every few years, then it's like nothing. The pain of obsessing about fairness is not worth it.

…Just some thoughts…

That's a really bad analogy. Ever used Finale? I guess a lot would have to do with how the competition is doing. I bet Abelton will run some more specials down the road. Yet they have not bent past a 33% discount. Presonus went so far to give a 50% discount. If Bitwig doesn't promote as an affordable alternative to Live, they can forget it.

In reality the Suite is not really worth it since there are so many 3rd party items superior to what's in the Suite. I think they should do away with the Suite and make one price and included everything in the Suite.

[pencilrocket]

And it's not like they've taken anything away. By way of contrast, Microsoft has gotten into the bad habit of deleting features in its products, over-simplifying, making the Windows desktop into a smartphone desktop, etc. Crazy crappiness to the max. Ableton on the other hand are just adding great features and improving the quality. It's a no brainer.

MS added features to Windows 8. So what is the point of this example to support your arguments? You are funny.

[synthcom]

I just want to echo some of what evil-banana said an clarify the issues I see with the pricing for upgrades.

I think that the majority of people upset with the pricing are suite or suite + M4L owners. As he pointed out we are getting the smallest discount which is not necessarily a problem for everyone, but it is one for me.

In addition to that Ableton acknowledged there was an issue with pricing for suite owners and told us there would be an introductory discount. After several months they then sent an email with information saying we would be getting a $100 dollar discount when upgrading to suite 9. In actuality, we only get $35 off the price they had been quoting us for the past four months. This offer is also valid for one week only giving us no time to wait for reviews of Push to come in before deciding if we want to upgrade. This one week offer also means (I assume) that if we don't buy in the first week the price they had been quoting us for the past four months will increase by $65. I'm not planning on buying it the first week so this special offer was mainly a notification that I would not be getting a discount and that in fact my price would be increasing. I'm upset with pretty much all aspects of how this special offer was handled.

Suite also doesn't have much to offer those of us who are suite+M4L owners already. When paying for our upgrade we get the great new features of live 9, but all the suite part give us is some new sounds. On the other hand those people upgrading from 8 to suite 9 get a bunch of great instruments and max for live in addition to a better discount. A standard 8 to standard 9 upgrade is much less expensive than a suite 8 to suite 9 upgrade (I assume because I can't check) and this makes me feel like I'm paying for stuff I paid for when I upgraded to suite 8 because I'm certainly not get much from the suite part of 9.

I also want to know if this is the way things are going to be in the future because if I may not upgrade to suite this time simply so I can take advantage of the bigger discount offered for upgrading to suite 9 + suite 10 for free when the time comes around.

Had these issues not been present I may have been fine with my upgrade price. But looking at the way abelton price all live 9 upgrades I am upset with the price I am being asked to pay. It's more of a comparative thing than an issue with my price in particular.

Absolutely my Point of view!

And what makes it worse:
I own Live8Suite and would upgrade to Live9Suite directly,
and after checking it in real life and testing it, I am interested in Push.

But with Abletons offer, I think I will pay more, and that is not ok I think.

[synthcom]

What's funny is how familiar this whole cycle is...Machinesworking nailed it -- we are all so predictable it's kinda scary. Live 10, cleanse fold & repeat...can't wait!

darklord-banana-guy, I really mean no offense, I'll admit I'm just a loud-mouth when it comes to expressing my opinion and I'm fully aware how absurd citing Syria was in the context of this thread. I'm the sort who will abuse the dumb priviledge of the net as a zone to just let fly when something irks me, etc. etc. With every release of Live some dozens of people get all butthurt and post paragraphs about how they've been personally wronged by Evil Ableton, which is where your post, I'm afraid, falls for me. I'm hardly as impressed with Live 9 and Ableton as you think I am -- in fact I'm eagerly awaiting to see how Bitwig plays out, specifically due to the feature set and all the stuff Live 9 lacks, of course. But I don't feel wronged, and I don't feel a need to complain -- well, aside from complaining about complainers, of course

-M

I think the problem is the short periode with reduced price, not the pricing itself.

[Machinesworking]

Hey at least nobody is going to get as accidentally burned by corporate moves as this one local guy I know, who bought every embedded plug in for Logic separately right after Apple bought them, literally right before they dropped the price of Logic from $700 to $200 and included the entire package. Can't remember the actual number but it was something like $3,000.00 to $200 in a single day.

This is totally OT but I don't think it could have gone down quite like that. Logic 6 was the first Apple version and Logic 7 was priced at $1000. I know because I got the academic discount for $500. The price cut down to $200 didn't happen until at least Logic 8, which was quite a while after Apple had bought it and well after the plugins could be bought or even used individually.

Right, but the plug ins were roughly $175+ apiece, EXS24, vocoder, convolution reverb, etc. about $1800+ worth. Logic was $799 without any plug ins.
So yeah it wasn't a single day, but two versions. All bundled with Logic for $999 in 7, then dropped to $200 in the next version. Still the sting must have been pretty hard for those that were loyally upgrading... That's what I was getting at. I can be mildly upset that Ableton aren't offering better upgrade options to loyal users, but it's nothing like the process Logic users went through with Apple. Though of course now Logic users are getting upgrades and full packages at a drastically cheaper price than we are.