The future of Live - should we worry? (video)

[[erm]]

I wonder though; while maybe the visitor numbers haven't dropped, the posting frequency certainly has.
Any idea why that is?

I don't think that's the case actually. If the number of overall posts have dropped (and I'm not saying they have), it's probably just because we no longer allow people to talk about whatever unrelated topics they want to. So many valid and legitimate posts were buried under unrelated and often offensive replies a couple years ago, it was just turning people away.

I would say that if anything we have more on-topic posts and helpful replies than ever before here on the forums.

[icehouse]

I wonder though; while maybe the visitor numbers haven't dropped, the posting frequency certainly has.
Any idea why that is?

I don't think that's the case actually. If the number of overall posts have dropped (and I'm not saying they have), it's probably just because we no longer allow people to talk about whatever unrelated topics they want to. So many valid and legitimate posts were buried under unrelated and often offensive replies a couple years ago, it was just turning people away.

I would say that if anything we have more on-topic posts and helpful replies than ever before here on the forums.

Can we at least get a "IGNORE" button for certain participants in these forums?
There is a lot of great responses, but, there is one participant that kills the flow of topics with 'I know it all' responses and just directs the topic into unnecessary territory.

[[erm]]

We are currently looking into forum improvements, though I don't know if that will be included. If you have an issues with a user not following the community guidelines, you're welcome to PM myself or [jur] about it and we'll look into it.

[Stefan Jantschek]

It´s always great to hear that Abletons are "monitoring" it.
But don´t you think that heartily conversation needs two ends of the line?

Years ago Ableton employees definitely participated in the forums more, but unfortunately it often just let to issues. Priorities change, schedules get adjusted, features talked about maybe weren't implemented as initially hinted at, etc. It all led to many users being not only overly demanding, but just flat out rude or disrespectful to the very people trying to be more open with them. I think it's safe to say that these days we prefer to wait until we actually have something exciting to show people before talking about it.

Even if you're not a beat maker.

Comprehensible decision focused on that aspect.
There might have been trouble.

But there was a great liaison between Abes and users too.
That made Ableton and Live what it is now.
The feeling that all of us were part of that creation.
Compared to put a decision in front of users.
There are still lots of people here who make dialog precious.
Do they get the statements they deserve?
Does this really need to be sacrificed for some honks with serious communication flaws?
Don´t we have other ways to get rid of them??

[TomKern]

I wonder though; while maybe the visitor numbers haven't dropped, the posting frequency certainly has.
Any idea why that is?

I don't think that's the case actually. If the number of overall posts have dropped (and I'm not saying they have), it's probably just because we no longer allow people to talk about whatever unrelated topics they want to. So many valid and legitimate posts were buried under unrelated and often offensive replies a couple years ago, it was just turning people away.

I would say that if anything we have more on-topic posts and helpful replies than ever before here on the forums.

Really?!

I'm not talking about the Lounge, that has certainly been affected by the topic ban.

But the main music production forum often hardly has any movement or new threads added for days now.
I would say what happens there in a week now, took place in a day just 3-4 years ago.

[Angstrom]

I suspect that the reason for the low-ish post count is mainly due to the current version being stuck on 9 for a while. But also there are a lot more Youtube learning resources these days. I bet most people sign up for an online course, go to a local meet up, or just watch YouTube videos.

Even so - a new version of Live would reinvigorate the forum ( That's not a very musical end-goal though!)
Most users ever online was 652 on Mon Mar 11, 2013 1:53 pm
The latest major release of Live, Version 9, was released on March 5, 2013.

On the topic of communication:
Personally I still wish for a developers blog. Their Twitter is semi-interesting, but it's not as good as having a UX guy blogging about the challenges of representing sound manipulation controls, having the DSP team talk about filters ... or even ...their information architects talking about the challenges of of delivering a multimedia library of sounds, songs, devices, 3rd party content - to a diverse userbase in an intuitive way.
Personally I would find that both interesting and reassuring.

I've said before: Post 2010 Ableton has the appearance of a shiny corporate monolith, and that's not reassuring.
Show me the real people and I'll believe in their vision. The best thing I've seen recently from Ableton was the video featuring that guy who made the Tuner. It was honest enough. "We were working on some visualisation stuff and I realised I could do this Tuner right now, so we did it as a surprise release".
Marketing departments buff everything to a sheen of impersonal instagram lifestyle crap. I do not care about some hot looking DJ. I am not a horny media consumer.

Give me a blog from the weird developer who is far too excited about zero delay filters and his fanatical obsession with aliasing. That's what I want.

[Machinesworking]

Did you see the video on the Abe´s site about their devs culture?
And the talk about "creating the future of music"?
So let me sum this up:
Why does almost nothing of the stuff you could see there reach the user?
Not even talks about?
What is the reason?
It´s not about specific needs or features.
But proclaiming to create the future while the product falls more and more behind the standards
of 2017´s software possibilities is some kind of strange, isn´t it?

I can't name one DAW developer that has every future leaning function in their DAW.
I can name 5 or more DAWs that have features that are future leaning the others do not have or do poorly. I can't name any developer that blogs about future functionality, that hasn't disappointed the end users by not delivering said functionality in x time frame.

There is no win for Ableton here, your ideas on what is future leaning for Live are probably not the same as mine. I like Live for live performance, so to me MainStage type patch changing would be a huge improvement, since you say you don't use Live that way maybe some non performance feature like Cubase's Note Expression or VCA faders would be a huge deal to you. If Live got more involved in integrating with other software that would be another huge deal to me you might not care about. Regardless if they have a sneak peak at future developments one of us is going to be upset. Owning Push 2 improvements there are always welcome, but those who do not couldn't care about that etc. etc.

Mostly I've stopped thinking of Live or Logic or DP etc etc. as somehow more than a tool. My workflow shouldn't and isn't anymore affected by some lack in a DAW etc. I was super excited about Bitwig before it was announced, anticipated maybe somehow the developers that left Ableton to start Bitwig were thinking just like I do about workflow etc. They don't, and they're already of course behind in developments they hinted at 3-4 years ago at their start, no web collaboration features yet, no integrated modular system built into the core....

Every DAW forum has dozens of people who think the latest version of DAW x is the beginning of the decline, the end times for said DAW. This thread has a video blog at the beginning with someone who is really happy in Cubase, that's great, but Steinberg are more than brutal when it comes to development cycles, bugs, feature issues and user complaints. Cubase Mac was crippled in terms of low latency performance, just a total CPU pig up until a few years ago, we're talking ten years of crippled. Bugs in v3 were promised in updates, then abandoned and reintroduced in v4. For years Cubase was the bug ridden DAW... but yeah it gets all the latest features...
My other DAW Digital Performer 9.12 has a new feature that renders all unarmed tracks to save CPU cycles, it's a huge project, and there are a lot of power users who have had to go back to previous versions of DP because the complexity of their setups exposes things in the update that cripple their systems. Some feel that Logic is becoming Garage Band Pro, it suffers immense scrutiny under Apple, even with some 'future' leaning features.


There is no greener grass, the unfinished songs on your hard drive are not there because of limitations in the software. People were making music with command line interfaces at one point, it's amazing how good we have it. For Chrissakes DAWs themselves are half the price they were ten years ago! Logic Pro was $799 then, same with Cubase, DP etc.

Yes, Ableton have not made us pay for a "real" upgrade, that's a good thing considering how much of the updates have been to improve Push. Makes perfect sense, but it's come at a complete upgrade cycle, and in that way I feel you. Hopefully they introduce things that excite you, but like I said, be sure that they will not introduce everything you want, no DAW will.
Oh, and rest assured they are working on a new version, there's no way they can't be. It's been forever since they charged for a software upgrade, and there are features people want that make sense for them to integrate. Poly aftertouch or something that addresses it makes sense for instance, (considering Push is poly aftertouch capable), collaboration features for sure, hopefully workflow improvements etc. etc. Personally owning Suite I sort of don't look forward to it, it's an upgrade chunk only matched by Komplete Ultimate in price.

[[jur]]

There is no greener grass, the unfinished songs on your hard drive are not there because of limitations in the software.

Thanks, I was about to tell this

About the "future". Just think about the number of Live users! As Roger Linn said (and other prominent instruments inventors) @ Loop : if defining the future of music making was about to listen to the user base's ideas, we'd all end up making the same instrument. Food for thoughts.
15+ years ago, 2 lonely german guys had an idea and developed what became Live...
I can assure you that a lot of very creative people are hanging around, sharing and debating ideas at the headquarter.
Thinking about "what the future of music making with a computer could be" when you deal with such a huge user base is not a piece of cake. But Ableton now organise Loop every year and invite clever people to talk about this very question and stole their ideas

[Machinesworking]

There is no greener grass, the unfinished songs on your hard drive are not there because of limitations in the software.

Thanks, I was about to tell this

I would add the grass is just different, and if that's what it takes to jump start you, then go ahead, but limitations exist in every piece of software out there, there are workflow issues with every piece of software as well.

Live does audio pitch and time stretching very well, it's 100% the easiest software to write verse chorus music with, or to play around with loops until they become a song. Huge linear arrangements ala film scoring etc. it's not the easiest to work with, but it's of course possible.


I will always have huge amounts of loops that go nowhere in my drives, that's not Live, that's the nature of brainstorming ideas, some never reach fruition. I have as many in DP, Renoise, and Logic. It's just how it works for me and many others. You know what different about Live than 90% of the other DAWs out there though? I can go through and render those loops as audio files, toss them as Clips in a Session Live set, then maybe come up with something that way.

Mostly these threads happen every time Live is long overdue for an upgrade.

[hyperscientist]

Wise words, Machinesworking & [jur], but despite knowing it all I don't think that I will ever stop being bothered by inability to use my Seaboard RISE or by the lack of multiple MIDI tracks editing (when composing for many instruments) or more things like it… They don't exactly stop me from making music, but are pretty damn close for certain things!

Oh gawddammit, just release Live 10 already! Or at least continue dropping hints like "Roger Linn is here just to say few things, nothing else really, we swear!" - that is actually encouraging

[Machinesworking]

Wise words, Machinesworking & [jur], but despite knowing it all I don't think that I will ever stop being bothered by inability to use my Seaboard RISE or by the lack of multiple MIDI tracks editing (when composing for many instruments) or more things like it… They don't exactly stop me from making music, but are pretty damn close for certain things!

Oh gawddammit, just release Live 10 already! Or at least continue dropping hints like "Roger Linn is here just to say few things, nothing else really, we swear!" - that is actually encouraging

Honestly if I had a Rise I would use Bitwig or Cubase. Other software doesn't work well with that thing yet. I do believe Ableton are hard at work on advanced instrument integration, it's an area they really need to address now that Bitwig is addressing it and copping their basic strengths. I'm liking that Live seems to be worried about performance again, and that's going to be a good thing for composers as well.

I wouldn't wait around for it if you can hear yourself playing music you love on the Rise though, it's not like romantic relationships, you can always return to Live when they get proper support for devices you love, Live won't make you feel bad about using other DAWs in the meantime when you come back to it.

[yur2die4]

For something like Seaboard Rise and vst3 support, there has been no mention that these features ought to be expected in Live 10.

What if Live 10 drops with plenty of new features and absolutely none of the ones you were dreaming of? Would you be anxious for Live 11?

This makes me curious though. What is the absolute minimum criteria they would expect to include in an upgrade. Something like vst3 is a way to kind of have the daw ready to face future tasks. Something like, a certain keyboard shortcut or particular workflow change are things that one might be happy enough to see appear in Live 9.

But that brings to mind another question. What are things which seem reasonably applicable in the current version. And what are features that would pretty much require a full version upgrade due to either massive changes in the core of Live or due to it being costly.

[Stefan Jantschek]

There is no greener grass, the unfinished songs on your hard drive are not there because of limitations in the software.

Ehhm...
Did i ever say this?
I was writing "ask yourself why they are there".
If they are.

If you assume that could be because of software limitations - O.K.
But that´s not my intention of thoughts.
Again, i don´t call Live limited.

That´s why i was mentioning Abletons headquarter.

I can assure you that a lot of very creative people are hanging around, sharing and debating ideas at the headquarter.
Thinking about "what the future of music making with a computer could be" when you deal with such a huge user base is not a piece of cake.

Is it so difficult to see some correlation?

[studiojohnny]

Get the basics right first!

Exactly. +1

[Machinesworking]

If I have to fiddle with GUI zoom back & forth to see what I edit, keep track of which & where clips I changed to update the others, wait for M4L to boot and load devices that should've been native, add a new audio track and re-sample my MIDI if I want to do a one-off edit/effect; all those seconds & minutes pile up to a tangible share of my music-making time. And mostly it's not about the time, but about breaking the creative flow. To this day it boggles my mind that if I want to zoom in in the Arranger I need to hold the ruler bar and drag down! Why not mouse wheel? Why down?! Sure, probably some of those issues are compensated elsewhere by Live's powerful features like racks, signal routing, high-quality & flexible native devices, Session view for storing and trying out the ideas, etc. But it's so annoying to realise that most of above mentioned issues can be easily solved if Ableton paid attention to user's requests, making Live hands down the best DAW.

I couldn't care less for a new loops pack or stupidly obvious tips in "One Thing"...

It's like buying a EUR 100k car with all bells & whistles, that has a rotary handles to open & close the windows.

Get the basics right first!

Back to this, the problem is always the same, doesn't matter which DAW you use. Go look at that the Feature Request section here, you'll find that 99% of the request are completely different than yours. Maybe one of you requests will be the same at most.
Mouse wheel zooming, my guess is never, because despite the amount of people who do not use Live to play live, it's going to have safety features that prevent accidents live. Using mouse wheel zooming in DP9 is great, but occasionally it messes up a fader or knobs settings, kind of the nature of mouse wheels while editing. Mostly I think of DAWs for what they offer now, and send in requests to the developers.
DP also gets people worrying about the future of the product, I would guess only Cubase and Reaper do not, they probably have people complaining about the usability of the product, because both are in a mad rush to implement new features without much concern for problems with existing,..... the whole thing is kind of amusing after 16 odd years with internet forums and DAWs, the products have always been amazing, with the occasional issue, but a godsend compared to what we used to deal with in the past.