What "real daw" features is Live still missing?

[CWoodOne]

SCORING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MIDI FUNCTIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


DECENT AUTOMATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


DECENT "Piano Roll" editor

Sidechaining compression, higher quality VI's and plugins

and and and and

A Guitar Tuner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Adonis]

Folder tracks would be awesome!!!

[dr.wackler]

I don't think this will allow the recorded tail to be superimposed at the start of the loop. I think all the second pass does is overwrite the other one.

Actually when you freeze a loop in Session view (and then drag a frozen clip to another track), that's exactly what happens:
The new file will be twice as long, first pass dry, second pass with the tail superimposed on the start of the loop; loop markers will be set to the second pass, start marker will be at beginning of the file.

[icedsushi]

A few good things there like show/hide tracks, more master automation, surround pan & sidechain comp. A few observations:

- sample, time & bpm grid modes

Yeah, sample accurate grid would be nice. Time grid at the bottom of arrange seems to be detailed enough for me. How would a bpm grid be displayed & how could it be meaningful to see it displayed that way?

- pan & volume handles on arrange objects/clips

They're on the session view at the bottom of every track, but yeah it would be nice to grab them while seeing the arrangement.

- more control of read ahead and other type of settings to optimize performance

You can raise the buffer. Be more specific?

- waveform monitoring

This is primarily eye candy IMO. Even on a wide screen, waveform moves too fast L to R too see anything significant for editing purposes. You can see when a transient is coming up without scrolling but chances are if you need to edit something, you already know what point to zoom in on. If you need to edit anything in detail, it's more useful to zoom in on a stationery waveform.

- scissors tool

cntrl+E, it's quicker & easier to use than a scissors tool. I used Logic for 3 years & I prefer the key command over a scissors tool which you've got to fiddle around with changing back & forth to the cursor. cntrl+E also doesn't waste valuable screen space like a redundant "toolkit" would, so hopefully you aren't implying that. IMO you need a tool to draw with but cutting/deleting are done more efficiently w/key commands.

- eraser tool

delete key, it's easier and again you don't lose your cursor, having to switch back again with yet another key command. If you need to eraser/delete that many notes/clips that it's more than half of what's there, maybe it's better to rubber band all the notes, hit delete & start over.

- shortcuts arent always predictable (must click somewhere on arrange screen before ctrl + b works after workin in certain areas of live)

Yeah, kinda see what you mean. I guess a minor quibble, would be nice if the shortcut worked everywhere. Of course, you wouldn't know if you have a pencil tool or not until you put your cursor over the clip view.

- OMF

Sorry my ignorance, but what is this?

- clip specific destructive effects

Not sure what this means. Instances of effects only go on tracks as an insert. Do you mean create a track within a track, being able to load a plugin into a clip? Why does it matter if an effect is destructive or not in it's relation to how it affects a clip (decimator, bit reduction)? Or perhaps you mean destructive editing...

- midi data filtering

We have the scale plugin. A velocity filter would be nice. What other filters do you need?

- event scripting

Man, I find editing with the piano roll way easier than trying to use using Logic's event editor but perhaps it would be cooler for the Max/MXP/tracker/programmer types out there to edit the same info that way.

- instrument definition scripts

?

- timeline based clip timestretching

Sounds like a great idea, I'd like to hear what creative uses there are for this...extreme stretching effects?

- transient detection

It's already there in auto-warping. Do you mean being able to select "beat slicer" mode as one of the warping choices? Now that would be nice...

- efficient use of clip objects on screen

How do you suggest? Showing automation in the colored area? That might be an idea...it would save screen space too if a redundant tool box was not added.

- user configurable layouts

See comment above about Logic screensets. Again, maybe just me but I think Ableton did a good job coming up w/the best layout they could without leaving the user in a mess of resizing windows which puts more attention on mousing around. If they did decide to do it, hopefully it wouldn't be window resizing mess Logic is. At least have the window boundaries always meet each other automatically rather than tediously making sure they don't overlap or waste screen space.

- multiple monitor friendliness

Personally, I prefer everything on 1 screen and just have a big screen for the same or less price than 2 screens, I find it distracting to have the frame of two screens be in the center of my view or have my head cocked to one side or the other all day. But maybe that's just me. I also think creating/resizing making sure screensets weren't overlapping with Logic was a colossal waste of clicking & time, too many options.

- studio layout maps / routing setups (altho much better in 6)

Not quite sure what kind of map you're referring to, sounds good though.

- record on sound signal

How high does the signal have to be to start recording? What about background noise starting the recording? Would you set a threshold? With a threshold, what about a small part of the attack getting cutoff, is that OK? If the recording started 2ms after beat 3 for example, when would the soundfile playback at clip quantize? Would a 2nd silence audiofile be consolidated into the beginning of the audiofile to the clip quantize value after the recording? Etc, etc...

Other DAW features I'd like to see:
- multiple automation parameter display
- multi track fader select (in Live 6?)

[melocoton]

- transient detection

It's already there in auto-warping. Do you mean being able to select "beat slicer" mode as one of the warping choices? Now that would be nice...

The auto-warping is hardly a fully-functioning transient detection feature. Ideally we need threshold controls and some sort of visual feedback. This could either be in the form of a recycle style slicer interface or a simple "strip silence" kind of menu command like other daws have had for the past decade or more.

Personally, I prefer everything on 1 screen and just have a big screen for the same or less price than 2 screens, I find it distracting to have the frame of two screens be in the center of my view or have my head cocked to one side or the other all day. But maybe that's just me.

Yes, it's just you. They need to at the very least give us the option of splitting out the arrange and session views onto two monitors. Ideally every interface element should be allowed to be undocked and free-floating if desired. I don't really need any complex logic style screensets but just simple multi-window functionality. It could still default to the classic one-pane mode for people who are opposed to the idea.

- record on sound signal

How high does the signal have to be to start recording? What about background noise starting the recording? Would you set a threshold? With a threshold, what about a small part of the attack getting cutoff, is that OK? If the recording started 2ms after beat 3 for example, when would the soundfile playback at clip quantize? Would a 2nd silence audiofile be consolidated into the beginning of the audiofile to the clip quantize value after the recording? Etc, etc...

Woah, calm down. This kind of feature has been available in all sorts of hardware and software devices for years. The questions you're asking have already been answered many times over. It's not rocket science.

[Nogi]

Yes, it's just you. They need to at the very least give us the option of splitting out the arrange and session views onto two monitors. Ideally every interface element should be allowed to be undocked and free-floating if desired. I don't really need any complex logic style screensets but just simple multi-window functionality. It could still default to the classic one-pane mode for people who are opposed to the idea.

Agreed.

Also, though minor, could we claim the real estate used by the Session View Selector and the Arrangement View Selector buttons. Combine them into 1 non-redundant switch. Everyone uses TAB anyway, right? It seems to exist strictly for branding purposes which seems counter to the efficient nature of Live.

One more niggle, they could make me happy by making the Stop All Clips square more prominent, either by assigning a shortcut or adding functionality to the transport area. (We have a lot of blank space going to waste up there!) Alternatively, you could just make it bigger.

[sweetjesus]

A few good things there like show/hide tracks, more master automation, surround pan & sidechain comp. A few observations:
sweetjesus wrote:


- sample, time & bpm grid modes

Yeah, sample accurate grid would be nice. Time grid at the bottom of arrange seems to be detailed enough for me. How would a bpm grid be displayed & how could it be meaningful to see it displayed that way?

You already have a BPM grid. I just mean most DAW's having the option of switching between the two.

sweetjesus wrote:
- pan & volume handles on arrange objects/clips
They're on the session view at the bottom of every track, but yeah it would be nice to grab them while seeing the arrangement.

Nah, I meant that clips on a timeline have additional controls on them. Like in SX, you can adjust the overall gain, fade in/out and pan of a clip on the timeline with little controls on the clip itself. Although clip envelopes makes this moot, but takes more clicks to get to.

sweetjesus wrote:
- more control of read ahead and other type of settings to optimize performance
You can raise the buffer. Be more specific?

In other DAW's, you can control how much audio is being read ahead that amount is added to the buffer.

This is primarily eye candy IMO. Even on a wide screen, waveform moves too fast L to R too see anything significant for editing purposes. You can see when a transient is coming up without scrolling but chances are if you need to edit something, you already know what point to zoom in on. If you need to edit anything in detail, it's more useful to zoom in on a stationery waveform.

I mean frequency monitoring tools. Spectrum analysis, phase monitoring etc...

cntrl+E, it's quicker & easier to use than a scissors tool. I used Logic for 3 years & I prefer the key command over a scissors tool which you've got to fiddle around with changing back & forth to the cursor. cntrl+E also doesn't waste valuable screen space like a redundant "toolkit" would, so hopefully you aren't implying that. IMO you need a tool to draw with but cutting/deleting are done more efficiently w/key commands.

Cheers, didnt know about this one. But once again this is stuff found in other DAW's

delete key, it's easier and again you don't lose your cursor, having to switch back again with yet another key command. If you need to eraser/delete that many notes/clips that it's more than half of what's there, maybe it's better to rubber band all the notes, hit delete & start over.

Again this is stuff found in other DAW's

Yeah, kinda see what you mean. I guess a minor quibble, would be nice if the shortcut worked everywhere. Of course, you wouldn't know if you have a pencil tool or not until you put your cursor over the clip view.

Seems we agree more refinement is needed here.

Sorry my ignorance, but what is this?

OMF is a basic file format which gives some basic cross DAW compatibility for project files. OMF's usually contain the clips and edit points and not much other info. I understand things like warping and stuff make this very difficult in Live. Bit it's not designed to be very robust...it does let you transport the heiarchy of your project between DAW's.

Not sure what this means. Instances of effects only go on tracks as an insert. Do you mean create a track within a track, being able to load a plugin into a clip? Why does it matter if an effect is destructive or not in it's relation to how it affects a clip (decimator, bit reduction)? Or perhaps you mean destructive editing...

Destructive editing indeed. In most DAW's you right click a clip or a segment of it, and apply FX from the list of available effects. You can tweak the effect and then apply it destructively.

We have the scale plugin. A velocity filter would be nice. What other filters do you need?

It's not about me. But a great deal of people would like to have all kinds of data filtered intelligently. At the moment people are stuck with plogue, energy xt etc for their midi data manipulation tasks.

Man, I find editing with the piano roll way easier than trying to use using Logic's event editor but perhaps it would be cooler for the Max/MXP/tracker/programmer types out there to edit the same info that way.

I've found weird crap, like a clip somewhere has a program change recorded or something which I just cant logically find and an event editor would let one sort it out technically. Sorry to keep beating the dead horse but once again just mentioning what's in other DAW's.

?

Most DAW's let you load scripts which have the preset names and bank/program numbers of patches on hardware devices.

Sounds like a great idea, I'd like to hear what creative uses there are for this...extreme stretching effects?

At the moment to stretch something you have to go to the warp markers and make Live think the clip is twice as long or something and with a bit of guessing and moulding you can stretch things to exact lengths, but other DAW's make this quite easy.

It's already there in auto-warping. Do you mean being able to select "beat slicer" mode as one of the warping choices? Now that would be nice...

I was trying to avoid the word slicer in fear of starting WW3 but yeah totally.

How do you suggest? Showing automation in the colored area? That might be an idea...it would save screen space too if a redundant tool box was not added.

The ergonomic stuff is a given, there's very little in this area in Live. Also I mean how efficient the arrange screen is with copy/paste stuff. This has been dramatically improved in Live6, but most DAW's seem to treat objects on the screen as shells which dont require much computation to move around and manipulate.

See comment above about Logic screensets. Again, maybe just me but I think Ableton did a good job coming up w/the best layout they could without leaving the user in a mess of resizing windows which puts more attention on mousing around. If they did decide to do it, hopefully it wouldn't be window resizing mess Logic is. At least have the window boundaries always meet each other automatically rather than tediously making sure they don't overlap or waste screen space.

There's ways to keep this clean. I've seen it done well in so many applications outside of the audio world. Just because emagic/apple/steinberg cant get it together doesn't mean Ableton can't.

Personally, I prefer everything on 1 screen and just have a big screen for the same or less price than 2 screens, I find it distracting to have the frame of two screens be in the center of my view or have my head cocked to one side or the other all day. But maybe that's just me. I also think creating/resizing making sure screensets weren't overlapping with Logic was a colossal waste of clicking & time, too many options.

It's just you.

Not quite sure what kind of map you're referring to, sounds good though.

Check out "Dashboard" in fruityloops. Also Cubase has a studio hardware setup thing too and Logic... well logic is ...Logic.

How high does the signal have to be to start recording? What about background noise starting the recording? Would you set a threshold? With a threshold, what about a small part of the attack getting cutoff, is that OK? If the recording started 2ms after beat 3 for example, when would the soundfile playback at clip quantize? Would a 2nd silence audiofile be consolidated into the beginning of the audiofile to the clip quantize value after the recording? Etc, etc...

I saw somebody else replied to this.

[eddit]

Pleeeeeease! I want a combination of recycle and simpler. Lol would life be good then. I know its not specifically relating to "how to turn Live into a DAW", but my goodness that would be sweet.

[glu]

mentioned many times in many places, but I must make my conviction.

In session view, we have a mixer we can see

in arrangement view, we don't, so we have to Tab to session view.

It's just the next logical step for Live as a production software. The ability to see a timeline in detail, while having the traditional mixer view simultaneously available seemed like a no brainer for me. I seriously thought 6 was going to as least make this a preference option.

¿Por qué no?

[John Sweet]

I'd like the ablility to scrub the preview for samples in the browser, color coded clips in the browser, color coded waveforms like Serato, and absolute recording of automation in Session View.

[melocoton]

In session view, we have a mixer we can see

in arrangement view, we don't, so we have to Tab to session view.

Absolutely! If we're not going to get dual monitor support or Detachable windows we AT LEAST need the option of having the mixer on the lower half of the arrange window just like it exists in the session view. Actually to amend my previous post, it's more important specifically to split out the arrange or session on one monitor and the mixer on the other, rather than arrange on one screen and session on the other. I've just gotten used to session being where the mixer lives but that doesn't actually make sense

[Mike Goodwin]

well this list covers all my big ones for sure.
for me it is something like this......

Show multiple controllers at a time! Please post in ths thread I made a long time ago if you want it ..........
http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=
Tracks groups and folders
Automation curves
Detachable windows for native ableton devices
OMF abilities would be FANTASTIC
Midi to audio track (a mid track that has an audio return built in for better hardware synth intagration)
other things that have been said before so I will stop there.

[Angstrom]

regarding OMF , in my experience they mainly tend to flow one way .. toward me for a remix, from a logic user. I've had to turn a few down because the logic user felt the fear when they realised they couldnt just give me the logic project or an OMF.ah well, sucks for them!

anyway, perhaps Live could just import them, not export?


there are a few that have probably been mentioned, but I'll do it again


overdubbing audio in one track, which can be 'unraveled' later.

crossfading in one track - there's a lot of people still don't seem to understand this concept, please don't mention DJ type crossfading.. different thing.

both of those require a major overhaul from the historical 'one track one stream' angle to allow multi-streams in one view/track.

Multiple lanes of automation visible for each track.

Edit midi notes in place in arrangement(in the track view), so we can work with two lanes at once.

group select a bunch of faders to drag 'em

folder tracks, so we can tidy things up a little

Mixer visible in the arrange page, or dual monitor mode, so the mixer can go on the second monitor. (this implies some flexibility in the GUI layout ...which would also be nice)

better arrangement management tools, so we can have multiple arrangements on the go at once.. that kind of thing. I often try an arrangement to try an idea, then have to delete it so its automation doesn't interfere with my work in session.

better integration with session - drag a section of an arrangement to session and it becomes a triggerable section. Ive been after this for ages - because when I take my work to 'arrange' then session is dead to me really. It would be great to make use of sessions power for arranging sections.

oh, step midi record (for the techno heads!)

god, I have loads more, those are just the ones I have encountered tonight while making the nasty noise.

[noiseconjecture]

Regarding the comparisons above between Logic and Ableton I must say I'm not a fan of Logic's plug-ins apart from Space Designer which is excellent, the high and low pass filters and the channel eq. For some reason I just can't get on with the instruments and don't really like the delays, limiters or compressors.

[icedsushi]

I'm not a big fan of most of the Logic plugs either. Most of them sounded pretty good but a little sterile for my taste. I can get sounds I like & more quickly with Operator & saturator, than with ES2 & the guitar amp effects in Logic for example.

cntrl+E, it's quicker & easier to use than a scissors tool. I used Logic for 3 years & I prefer the key command over a scissors tool which you've got to fiddle around with changing back & forth to the cursor. cntrl+E also doesn't waste valuable screen space like a redundant "toolkit" would, so hopefully you aren't implying that. IMO you need a tool to draw with but cutting/deleting are done more efficiently w/key commands.

Cheers, didnt know about this one. But once again this is stuff found in other DAW's

Sure, wow good thing you know about it now! Must have been a relief. It must have been pretty hard to get by without cntrl+E all this time. If you click/drag straight down on the arrange to make a line, then hit cntrl+E you have a scissors tool that goes back to the cursor automatically.

delete key, it's easier and again you don't lose your cursor, having to switch back again with yet another key command. If you need to eraser/delete that many notes/clips that it's more than half of what's there, maybe it's better to rubber band all the notes, hit delete & start over.

Again this is stuff found in other DAW's

Some good points above...I see what you mean, while there are "DAW" features missing from Live, I am also suprised how well I am doing without some of those "missing features", or don't miss many of them since I stopped using Logic. After Live 5 came out, it had enough features for me to use it exclusively with relatively little sacrifice. So what stuff do we really need and what stuff would mostly go unused for 99% of users?

My only point is that before adding some of these things, it is a good time for Ableton to decide if they are really 100% necessary before jumping on the bandwagon & adding them simply because other software has them. Some extra "DAW" features & ergonomic enhancements would be great but I think making Live more & more like Logic would be a step in the wrong direction. cntrl+E instead of scissors tool is just a small example. "Do we really need a scissors tool or would adding it be largely redundant to what it already in place?" These are good questions to ask before just dropping them into the app. In some ways this could differentiate Live less from Logic or give someone more reason to just choose Logic which is what they really want anyway. Instead of just throwing in features exactly like Logic has, I think they can do some of those important DAW things but in new modernized/streamlined/innovative ways which would not jumble & bloat the user interface. They have been good at this so far, adding DAW features slowly/carefully without bloating the "live" ideal so I look forward to see what comes next.