Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Share what you’d like to see added to Ableton Live.
Tarekith
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by Tarekith » Tue Jun 04, 2019 1:46 am

All of the moderators here do far more for Ableton than just moderate the forums FYI. Thanks to Skype and FaceTime, we don’t need to live in Berlin to provide feedback and help shape the direction Live takes. Though we’ve been there more than a few times for that purpose too.
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gbert
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by gbert » Tue Jun 04, 2019 4:40 am

My favorite new features of 10.1 are pinch-to-zoom and VST3 support. Pinch-to-zoom took Ableton from a somewhat clunky feeling interface to a much more intuitive one. It’s my favorite DAW now to scroll and zoom around on with a trackpad.

I would still love to see enhancements to the piano roll akin to FL Studio. Scale detection/highlighting, right-click to delete, using a single tool to single-click and be able to resize notes would all be welcome. Would also love to see a chord stamp capability, arpeggiation in place (without using a midi effect), etc.

And would like to see comping. The infrastructure is almost there with the grouped track function. I can mock up a kind of comping using a combination of duplicating tracks in a group, splitting, and using the 0 key to disable clip sections. It just needs to be combined into an elegant Ableton workflow and tool. Doesn’t seem the draw tool does much of anything for audio clips. Would be great for that to be repurposed into a comp tool.

I do get the feeling that centercode is largely ignored. I was active there for a while, and it seems like major requests are not publicly acknowledged or acted upon. Perhaps it is the Ableton corporate strategy to be aloof with its communications. But in this era of social media reps and a connected society, it does feel quite disconnected as-is. More specifically, it feels this way because some requests in centercode with high vote counts have been there for years. Seems somewhat obvious to prioritize that kind of feedback for new release features.

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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by S4racen » Tue Jun 04, 2019 8:41 am

studiojohnny wrote:
Mon Jun 03, 2019 11:30 pm

*sigh* Yeah, I'm sure they don't start any developer meetings without conferencing in all their vital forum moderators. :roll:
Please tell us more about how you know how Ableton run their business?

Cheers
D

[jur]
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by [jur] » Tue Jun 04, 2019 9:04 am

S4racen wrote:
Tue Jun 04, 2019 8:41 am
studiojohnny wrote:
Mon Jun 03, 2019 11:30 pm

*sigh* Yeah, I'm sure they don't start any developer meetings without conferencing in all their vital forum moderators. :roll:
Please tell us more about how you know how Ableton run their business?

Cheers
D
I used to make some coffee, turkish style indeed, for the 200+ employees of this small company when I go to the HQ too.
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Angstrom
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by Angstrom » Tue Jun 04, 2019 1:00 pm

gbert wrote:
Tue Jun 04, 2019 4:40 am
I do get the feeling that centercode is largely ignored. I was active there for a while, and it seems like major requests are not publicly acknowledged or acted upon. Perhaps it is the Ableton corporate strategy to be aloof with its communications. But in this era of social media reps and a connected society, it does feel quite disconnected as-is. More specifically, it feels this way because some requests in centercode with high vote counts have been there for years. Seems somewhat obvious to prioritize that kind of feedback for new release features.
I would guess its more like a combination of the following things

centercode policy

I bet if Ableton have anything to ask about your submission they will ask it. But if not then your bug/suggestion will get put into an internal system and triaged deep down all the way to the bottom of the "possible to do" list and your centercode submission will become covered in digital dust. You will say "well, what was the point of that" and they will say "it has functioned correctly". They don't really consider how it feels to submit bugs, or the emotional investment a user has. It's just a list of to-do jobs.

Is Ableton aloof with it's communications? Again, point of view. I've stated to them privately that I think their blog posts should be less about DJ Fabulosa rocks a beatpack from AffiliateZ ... and there should be more posts such as "Mic from our code team writes about his passion for component modelling". It's not giving anything away about upcoming products, it's just showing a human side. Back when Robert used to pop up on here he was their human relatable side. The dev team used to comment here too.
I have said to them before that showing a human side is really really important. I have stated that the Steve Jobs model, where there's just the visible CEO and an impermeable obelisk of a corporation looming over the consumers dealing out corporate marketing ... this is not very cool. What's cool is Teena's passion for interpolation, Blarg and Jimbo's interest in visualisation of audio.
The suggestion was met with the response one might expect from a corporate obelisk. From my point of view unsatisfying, from their point of view optimal.

As for the suggestions list.
I wouldn't ever expect the top voted things to happen first. That's not how it works.
Make a list of all the things you want in you life, order them with the absolute best thing at the top.
Now order that same list by order of what items you can complete this year, in sequence.
Compare the two lists.
There's your answer

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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by [jur] » Tue Jun 04, 2019 2:25 pm

Actually, if you have a look at Centercode's suggestions for Live9 and now Live10, you'll be surprised to learn that probably 80% of the most rated suggestions have been implemented these last few years...
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by Angstrom » Tue Jun 04, 2019 3:14 pm

[jur] wrote:
Tue Jun 04, 2019 2:25 pm
Actually, if you have a look at Centercode's suggestions for Live9 and now Live10, you'll be surprised to learn that probably 80% of the most rated suggestions have been implemented these last few years...
Yes. I think people miss that. The feature requests just don't happen in order of "most voted for" because to put on trousers requires putting on underwear first.

Now, how do we stop people voting for obvious and slightly unimaginitive things?
The problem I actually have with the wishlist is it's all the most obvious stuff. "A faster horse".
Often the most innovative ideas come out of leftfield and users are most likely to say "But I like the interface" rather than the actually more progressive "I wish there was a ...way .. it ... could be ... more ... coherent and ...intuitive??!" or "Can it be better on stage? That would be massively useful"

People are more likely to ask for MP3 export, comping or MPE. All useful stuff but something they've previously used. It's known.
Live has a paradigm breaking UI with Session, and was originally built for stage and it's just kinda stagnated.
Adding MPE is great but not really going to leverage that initial creative spark that Robert and Gerhard made.

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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by studiojohnny » Tue Jun 04, 2019 3:18 pm

[jur] wrote:
Tue Jun 04, 2019 2:25 pm
Actually, if you have a look at Centercode's suggestions for Live9 and now Live10, you'll be surprised to learn that probably 80% of the most rated suggestions have been implemented these last few years...
I'm no mathematician, but...

Image

[jur]
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by [jur] » Tue Jun 04, 2019 3:27 pm

You're not mathematician ok, but you certainly don't know how to sort the results. :)
Here's the Live 9 list btw:
Image

That's not too bad imho.

Bu in any case, what Angstrom said...
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studiojohnny
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by studiojohnny » Tue Jun 04, 2019 4:50 pm

[jur] wrote:
Tue Jun 04, 2019 3:27 pm
You're not mathematician ok, but you certainly don't know how to sort the results. :)
Here's the Live 9 list btw:
Image

That's not too bad imho.

Bu in any case, what Angstrom said...
Sorted and annotated. Might have added/missed a few but at first glance this does not look like 80% implementation to me.

Regardless: look at that feature sitting right at the ol' top of the pile. Comping. And show/hide tracks is right up there. Let's go already. It's been 4 years since this thread started. FFS.

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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by Angstrom » Tue Jun 04, 2019 5:02 pm

I think it might be fairer to look at the wishlist for Live 9, as those were the wishes implemented in Live 10

I marked in green those that they implemented in L10 so far.

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studiojohnny
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by studiojohnny » Wed Jun 05, 2019 2:36 am

Angstrom wrote:
Tue Jun 04, 2019 5:02 pm
I think it might be fairer to look at the wishlist for Live 9, as those were the wishes implemented in Live 10

I marked in green those that they implemented in L10 so far.

Image
I mean, they just released 10.1 so I think it's fair to use the L10 list but whatever. Even this list would be much better if it was inverted. They're picking the wrong things. Are they cool? Sure. Fine. But we make songs. We make music. People sing. People play things. You have to pick the best takes. Comping is more central to music making than some of these other obscure updates.

We want comping.
Last edited by studiojohnny on Wed Jun 05, 2019 11:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Tarekith
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by Tarekith » Wed Jun 05, 2019 2:48 am

What are your thoughts on comping though, have you considered that in Live?
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studiojohnny
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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by studiojohnny » Wed Jun 05, 2019 11:39 pm

Tarekith wrote:
Wed Jun 05, 2019 2:48 am
What are your thoughts on comping though, have you considered that in Live?
I'm assuming that was sarcastic but if you're serious, it would be nice to have something like Logic where you could quickly assemble multiple takes without having to manually slice one long take and duplicate down to 8 tracks or something. It's painful currently.

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Re: Why does Ableton keep adding new features that no one wants?

Post by hoffman2k » Thu Jun 06, 2019 7:14 am

studiojohnny wrote:
Wed Jun 05, 2019 11:39 pm
Tarekith wrote:
Wed Jun 05, 2019 2:48 am
What are your thoughts on comping though, have you considered that in Live?
I'm assuming that was sarcastic but if you're serious, it would be nice to have something like Logic where you could quickly assemble multiple takes without having to manually slice one long take and duplicate down to 8 tracks or something. It's painful currently.
You'd need something like group tracks within groups for something like that to ever work!

If you think about it, you're about one feature update removed from having comping. Splitting the takes into different tracks would be trivial, since Live already records takes. The only thing you really miss then is the ability to fade between takes. It doesn't hurt that multi-clip editing already got added, probably needs a tweak for comping, but its there.

Bounce in place would never have worked if you can't even freeze sidechained tracks.

Look at it like a game of Tetris. Ableton is building a pile of blocks as high as a skyscraper with one line free. And we're all waiting for that straight block to drop, so some lines (on the request list) can be cleared.

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