what bugs me most about the (primitive) MIDI support, and especially the Editing capabilities in the Arrangement view, is that ABLETON is now advertising LIVE as a COMPLETE musical workstation - creation, performance, production.
but it's way, way short on implementation, as anyone who's used a good DAW knows-- SONAR, ProTools, LOGIC, etc
Ableton better step it up (and i encourage you to do it!!!) before they start losing customers .
... until they build a program that can back up their claims, i'd rather LIVE just focus on making the coolest performance tool they can (in which case:: Sampler should've been much, much cheaper OR the "piece de resistance" of the Live 6 upgrade).
heck! - Live doesn't even include a "live" pitchshifting plug-in for realtime performance use -- what the f**k is that about????
you can do workarounds for some flexibility, but if you start losing speed and functionality and response-time, (by having to route individual Impulse tracks to separate Audio Tracks, just to be able to Mute or Solo them individually, for example) then Ableton's falling off their own track (and i find that very sad and frustrating quite frankly)
Relevant to this: in the recent COMPUTER MUSIC special LIVE addition, Jan 2007, volume 20: Ableton CEO Gerhard Behles is asked about "seasoned Live users' five biggest gripes about the program."
Q: There's still no Scissors tool in the Arrangement view? Why is this?
A: Hmm.. Do you know about Live's Split command - CTRL/Cmnd+E? THIS KEEPS US FROM ADDING MORE BUTTONS TO THE INTERFACE AND ACHIEVES NEARLY THE SAME RESULT.
WHHWHWHATTT????? (my response)
Use yer brains' Ableton> First of all, I would not cry if 5 buttons were added if it helped me EDIT AUDIO faster!!! Second of all: Don't want to add a button?? Then simply let CONTROL-E turn the cursor into a Scissors tool, so that a CLIP can be SPLIT right where you point and click -- so you don't have to hunt/search and highlight (lasso) a block and THEN hit CTRL-E.. what does this do? it saves us all editing time by making a common action quicker and easier to perform.
and this is off-topic a bit, but still relevant:
Why on earth when you click on the SEND channels to edit/examine their FX, do you ever have to see the audio clip window view???? there will never be anything there. you can't put anything there. WE should all immediately see the FX window appear at the bottom, no fuss, no need to push any more buttons or keys or click on a different window view tab.
maybe some would say that's a minor gripe, but, hey, c'mon. It's clean and functional GUI design 101 -- Ableton did great on this in most respects, but this lack of the correct/relevant view appearing is a glaring omission, and it wastes the User's time.
i'll shut up now.
i love LIVE -- i'm just not as "in love" as i used to be
