So far, miserable upgrade experience for Live 9.

[TomSwirly]

I broke down and purchased Live 9 - then I ran my sequences and was greeted, mostly, with silence. It seems that Live 9 does not recognize all my very many Native Instruments patches.

I searched and found a lot of complaints along these lines - the general solution seems to be that I need to "search" for each patch missing individually, but that will take hours (particularly if I have to locate the patch by hand, which seems generally to be the case...)

So I went back to Live 8 to check that my sequences still worked - I have a show in just under two weeks - but now Live 8 is "Scanning Library" and has been for the last 30 minutes or so, and is still not even 50% of the way through.

God, I hope Live 9 hasn't broken my Live 8 installation.

Overall, this is an appalling experience. I have as generic a machine as I could arrange, I only use this for music software and I only have Ableton, NI and Max installed on it. I shouldn't be in the middle of my second hour of trying to work this out without having a made a sound!

Update: Live 8's reading the libraries having apparently stalled at 46%, I interrupted it. To my great joy, the two tracks I've tried do seem to work fine.

But this only makes the badness of the upgrade worse.

When I upgrade, my number one priority is expecting to be able to continue to work without interruption.

Here, I have a clean machine, with everything installed in default locations, and Ableton documents that do in fact work perfectly under Live 8. And when I run them on Live 9, they apparently load, there are no errors or warnings, and I get nothing - no sound.



I'm going to experiment a little - but I only have two weeks to go, and even though I have almost all the material ready, I'm already wondering if it's worth the risk to try to use Live 9.

[TomSwirly]

Oh, and now I'm realizing Live 9 wants to authorize every time I run it!

And I play in clubs - I have no idea if I have internet when I play or not.

For shame!!! I'm contacting Ableton about this one.

[beats me]

Why did you upgrade to 9? Just curious if you had any direct reasons.

[TomSwirly]

Multimonitor support - my eyes aren't what they used to be.

I'm also very curious about the ability to glue together controllers with MIDI notes - that's the one killer feature that I had in Opcode Vision in 1990, and with Digital Performer and Logic today, but unfortunately don't have.

UPDATE: I got at least one sequence to work without "finding".

1. I opened it in Live 9. No go.
2. I opened it in 8, and cancelled on the "Load Library" dialog.
3. I played it - worked fine.
4. I did NOT save the file.
5. I closed Live 8 and opened it in Live 9 and it seems to be working OK...

More news as it comes! Still having to authenticate every time.

[tigali]

I'm also very curious about the ability to glue together controllers with MIDI notes - that's the one killer feature that I had in Opcode Vision in 1990, and with Digital Performer and Logic today, but unfortunately don't have.

What is this, please? I don't understand.

[TomSwirly]

Unfortunately, it is NOT a feature that Live 9 has - I was misled by talking to someone who should know.

I've been complaining about this for *five years* and I've been basically been told that I'm being difficult and unreasonable - but pretty well every other sequencer has had this feature for the last two decades!

It's simple enough. I play a MIDI track in, including things that aren't notes, like breath control and pitch bend. Then I want to stretch that MIDI track - but you simply can't do it. You can stretch just the notes in time, but all your breath control and pitch bend stays just where it is - so it basically breaks your track (particularly in the case of my main instrument, an electronic wind instrument).

There are all sorts of reasons that I want this feature. My typical way of composition is just to turn off the metronome and to play stuff until I get something I like, and then stretch it so it matches the actual bars.

Ableton's response: "Use the metronome". As I explain, I don't KNOW what tempo I'm going to want - and I don't WANT to always play to a metronome, I'm not trying to get music that sounds like a metronome! (And, even when I do record to a metronome, sometimes I want to tweak my performance a little...)

The fact is that *this is a bug* for anyone who actually plays an instrument. I can't think of any reason why you would want to take a performance of yours and move only the notes around, leaving all the other controllers where they were. This BREAKS the recorded track, and there's no warning.

On my instrument, at least, the result is "no sound at all".

[TomSwirly]

UPDATE on the workaround.

The above workaround didn't work in all cases - but a slight tweak is so far working for me.

1. Open the project in Live 8.
2. You should test to see it still works, but they all still worked for me.
3. Execute "Collect All And Save" from the File pulldown menu.
4. Close Live 8.
5. Open the project in Live 9.

Everything should work exactly the same.

This is a bit strange to me, since I'm in the habit of doing "Collect All And Save" an awful lot - and I did that right before I brought these projects onto this machine. But I'm not going to argue with success.

[chase]

Unfortunately, it is NOT a feature that Live 9 has - I was misled by talking to someone who should know.

I've been complaining about this for *five years* and I've been basically been told that I'm being difficult and unreasonable - but pretty well every other sequencer has had this feature for the last two decades!

It's simple enough. I play a MIDI track in, including things that aren't notes, like breath control and pitch bend. Then I want to stretch that MIDI track - but you simply can't do it. You can stretch just the notes in time, but all your breath control and pitch bend stays just where it is - so it basically breaks your track (particularly in the case of my main instrument, an electronic wind instrument).

There are all sorts of reasons that I want this feature. My typical way of composition is just to turn off the metronome and to play stuff until I get something I like, and then stretch it so it matches the actual bars.

Ableton's response: "Use the metronome". As I explain, I don't KNOW what tempo I'm going to want - and I don't WANT to always play to a metronome, I'm not trying to get music that sounds like a metronome! (And, even when I do record to a metronome, sometimes I want to tweak my performance a little...)

The fact is that *this is a bug* for anyone who actually plays an instrument. I can't think of any reason why you would want to take a performance of yours and move only the notes around, leaving all the other controllers where they were. This BREAKS the recorded track, and there's no warning.

On my instrument, at least, the result is "no sound at all".

I agree, this is a bug. Stretching a MIDI clip should retime ALL the MIDI events, not just the notes, and this is not an esoteric or niche feature. Unfortunately since Ableton Live was initially developed to play audio loops, its MIDI functionality is still pretty far from where it should be (no wait-note record mode, no sysex, only one MIDI channel, etc). "Use the metronome" is a workaround (and not a very effective one), not a solution.

[Angstrom]

Actually Live9 is partially capable of this, it just isn't delivered very transparently. You need to select a range, rather than the notes - and further to that you need to select the range and then stretch the range in note view.
Like this.




Also, it's not everything you would want from such a feature : for example it will not work in arrangement, it only works with the new Session Automation and it's a bit unpredictable. But this is my knowledge on the subject, so I am passing it on.

[TomSwirly]

This is a big "WOW" for me! I'm probably not going to get a chance this week to use this - I have a big show on Saturday and will be spending my musical time cleaning up existing material, but this might solve many of my problems.

Huge thanks!