My Complaint With the Direction of Live.

[Division Monarchy]

Well, I'm glad that the acknowledgement of its clunkiness, and the fact that there is work being done to improve it. If Ableton is committed to M4L, then I really hope that the next version is smoother.

I have so many problems with mappings and presets being recalled on M4L devices in a Live set that I feel like every time I use it that I need to treat it like I'm working on analog gear, which having things mapped out and having a recall issue is not something I want to deal with performing live.

I still stand by my original point that I would like to see more native Live devices that I'm not as comfortable with in M4L.

Also, don't get me wrong, as I appreciate what others have managed to create with M4L. I didn't start this post with the intent to ask Ableton to drop M4L, but I think there needs to be a healthy discussion about M4L because it seems I'm not the only user who experiences difficulty and frustrations with it.

Regardless of everything I'm saying, I do appreciate Ableton working hard to keep developing and improving their product line.

[chapelier fou]

i kind of agree for the LFO. A native one would be much better.

[BoddAH]

You shouldn't look at M4L and native devices as an either/or thing.

"Official" Ableton M4L devices are, more often than not, derived from community-made devices that Ableton considers good enough to get their seal of approval. Ableton releases them to be nice and to promote M4L and show off what it can do.

You really should look at them as what they are, nice free goodies.

Implementing all those experimental and sometimes weird new things into live as native devices would bloat the software and actually represent a huge amount of work for the actual Ableton dev team which is probably spent doing other things.

It's just not going to happen.

[pencilrocket]

You really should look at them as what they are, nice free goodies.

it's not free. people actually paid for m4l.

[BoddAH]

You really should look at them as what they are, nice free goodies.

it's not free. people actually paid for m4l.

People paid for M4L which is a development tool.

People can also pay for select third party M4L devices in Ableton Live packs.

But people never directly paid for the cool but unstable/CPU-heavy plug-ins they complain so much about.

Usually Ableton throws them in with paid or free updates to sweeten the deal and, indeed, to make people want to have/buy M4L itself. But the devices themselves are free.

[Angstrom]

I think the idea of providing a graphical software interface for users to make their own Audio & Control toys is a good idea.

The problem is implementation. Max has always been very academic and opaque, and while the odd choices eventually become invisible as a person gets used to the foibles the reality is - its a graphical representation of a very odd programming style. It can make great things once you conform but the harsh division between programmers who learned to tollerate the visual programming style and people who just want to patch parts of Ableton ... That's a harsh divide.

"Boxes and wires" can be very immediate and intuitive if the objects represented have familiarity: Picture three boxes called "midi note trigger" with an output called "trigger out", and here's "Oscillator" with inlets called waveshape and pitch. Now there's a box labelled "multimode filter". What inlets would you expect to see labelled on this box. How might you guess you would use this with the other two? You can already guess. You have familiarity with these terms, we all do.

A user can look at this visual "boxes and wires" metaphor and make a leap from their existing knowledge and connect the visual dots.

That immediacy and learnability was at the heart of Ableton Live

[mekanism1200]

Max 7 seems to be much more stable for me so I am now using it more. I think what might be a good idea is to have a vote on what M4L devices we all would want native and Ableton could take that into account. I would vote for Convolution Reverb, LFO, and Granulator 2.

I would also like to see a better way of wrapping all of the sounds in a M4L device so they don't eat up RAM. I have several M4L devices that are awesome, but take forever to load and use 2gb RAM just sitting there.

So far I'm really happy with 9.5, it seems to be a little faster for me on Win 10, although that could be a placebo, and I have only messed with it for a few hours.

Going forward I would really like to see tabbed projects ala Bitwig, one-click bounce to audio, bounce drum racks to audio, higher res ui, more ui color options and tweaking, custom toolbars. Ableton also needs to implement better touch support, people want to make music on tablets.

[login]

The instruments specially are CPU heavy.

I agree that I would love to see many devices as Native: LFO, envelope, convolution reverb, drum synths and Magnetic/Difussion.

[deva]

Well, I'm glad that the acknowledgement of its clunkiness, and the fact that there is work being done to improve it. If Ableton is committed to M4L, then I really hope that the next version is smoother.

I have so many problems with mappings and presets being recalled on M4L devices in a Live set that I feel like every time I use it that I need to treat it like I'm working on analog gear, which having things mapped out and having a recall issue is not something I want to deal with performing live.

I still stand by my original point that I would like to see more native Live devices that I'm not as comfortable with in M4L.

Also, don't get me wrong, as I appreciate what others have managed to create with M4L. I didn't start this post with the intent to ask Ableton to drop M4L, but I think there needs to be a healthy discussion about M4L because it seems I'm not the only user who experiences difficulty and frustrations with it.

Regardless of everything I'm saying, I do appreciate Ableton working hard to keep developing and improving their product line.

I also prefer native devices. M4L crashes a little too often for me, so I mostly stopped using it. When I don't use M4L, Live 9 is super stable for me. I value that more than just about anything.

[deva]

Especially considering that the internal modulation options in Bitwig are far beyond anything I have seen cooked up in M4L!
The M4L LFO and Envelope Follower wouldn't even cut it if they were native devices!

The one thing you get with modulation in Live is being able to modulate parameters across tracks...

[sonik777]

M4L is cool, but Live definitely & desperately needs native:

LFO

Convolution Reverb





Seriously why haven't these been developed as native devices?

C'mon guys, for the love of jebus make this happen.

[stringtapper]

I think the idea of providing a graphical software interface for users to make their own Audio & Control toys is a good idea.

The problem is implementation. Max has always been very academic and opaque, and while the odd choices eventually become invisible as a person gets used to the foibles the reality is - its a graphical representation of a very odd programming style. It can make great things once you conform but the harsh division between programmers who learned to tollerate the visual programming style and people who just want to patch parts of Ableton ... That's a harsh divide.

"Boxes and wires" can be very immediate and intuitive if the objects represented have familiarity: Picture three boxes called "midi note trigger" with an output called "trigger out", and here's "Oscillator" with inlets called waveshape and pitch. Now there's a box labelled "multimode filter". What inlets would you expect to see labelled on this box. How might you guess you would use this with the other two? You can already guess. You have familiarity with these terms, we all do.

A user can look at this visual "boxes and wires" metaphor and make a leap from their existing knowledge and connect the visual dots.

That immediacy and learnability was at the heart of Ableton Live

Max ultimately comes from a "computer music" paradigm and not a "music made with a computer" paradigm. You can go through books like Roads's The Computer Music Tutorial and Dodge's Computer Music and find all of the theoretical bases for what goes on inside Max. It is, after all, a descendant of Max Mathews's MUSIC. Max For Live is essentially a collision of commercial software (Live) and "research-style" software (Peter Elsea's term).

Personally I think it's the best thing since sliced bread, but I also took the time to learn how to use it. It's also very stable for me.

Sucks that it doesn't work for everyone else.

[Angstrom]

Oh don't get me wrong. I know how to use it.


EG: I made this yesterday - it takes midi Program change messages and turns them into something which controls rack chain selection.


I am fully capable of using it - I just think it's not the right solution.
I spend 8 hours a day programming and what I want from my music solution is to use the other bit of my brain.
My programming brain is TIRED. Ableton Live was famous for its intuitive learnable interface. The design provided great usability. That's what I want.

Making patches feels musical and rewarding. I send A to B to C. An oscillator goes to a filter, through an overdrive. Each step of the way the noise educates me to the next step. Sonic sculpting. I love that. That is what I want more of. Great UI design.

Yeah, having made a MIDI patch changer is rewarding when I'm FINISHED, but it never for a second felt musical and intuitive.
Converting symbols to lists, deferring event propagation, writing functions and debugging is not funky.

I'm going to quote the Ableton front page here

Making music is hard. To stay in the flow you need to be able to capture your ideas quickly, and you need technology to stay out of the way.

[stringtapper]

Never fear. These guys have you covered:

http://csoundforlive.com

[mrgrim3]

I think max4live will get better as time goes on

ive had a lot less crashes since updating from max 6 to max 7

probably how it doesn't work in rewire when ableton is slave mode is the most annoying thing I can think of but that's not really a problem with max4live I think but with rewire itself

bit high cpu usage too but I don't have the greatest cpu

I personally don't use it to its potential by making my own devices but I think it would be a good thing to learn for anyone who has it