Ableton Forum

I've been a Live user since Live 2. The Live 10 upgrade pricing is positively ridiculous. I simply won't upgrade until it's offered at a significant discount (Black Friday?).

It honestly makes me want to spend more time working with competing companies that don't price gouge their longtime users.

William wrote:I've been a Live user since Live 2. The Live 10 upgrade pricing is positively ridiculous. I simply won't upgrade until it's offered at a significant discount (Black Friday?).

It's going to be 20% off, just as now. I have multiple friends who say they won't update. They didn't mention the price, but it could be a factor. I think they're just happy with what they got in 9.

The earlier you update the more you enjoy the following development, remember we are not just paying for the new features announced but it would be safe to assume more stuff will come in the following years.

Finally preordered.

Thanks Ableton for putting out a great piece of kit. I like the new features for my push 2 and drum buss. The overdrive on drum buss and transient control is amazing.

I can't wait to check out the new sample library too.

I've been enjoying the beta but I can't justify dropping £200+ on buying suite again when I already own it. If it was around £100 I would have already pre-ordered my upgrade but £200 for a slightly different version of a product I already own is a non-trivial amount to be spending.

Gregory Wells-King wrote:The new Live 10 is great and has some solid features and speed that make it one of the best music making and music production tools out there again. but at £183 I simply can't find a logical reason to upgrade from Live 9.

In fact because I'm a suit owner and MAX is now fully integrated into Live 10 I can't upgrade unless I buy the suit as frankly; despite Wavetable look fab I simply don't need it or the new effects for that matter.

When I consider everything I have ever learnt and focused on in music making and production I quickly justify my decision not to upgrade Live at this price, simply for me it's far better at this point to focus with the tools I already have.

If your new to Live or music production in general and have £500 earmarked for a new DAW then knock yourself out, you won't be disappointed.

totally agree

ian_halsall wrote:

Gregory Wells-King wrote:The new Live 10 is great and has some solid features and speed that make it one of the best music making and music production tools out there again. but at £183 I simply can't find a logical reason to upgrade from Live 9.

In fact because I'm a suit owner and MAX is now fully integrated into Live 10 I can't upgrade unless I buy the suit as frankly; despite Wavetable look fab I simply don't need it or the new effects for that matter.

When I consider everything I have ever learnt and focused on in music making and production I quickly justify my decision not to upgrade Live at this price, simply for me it's far better at this point to focus with the tools I already have.

If your new to Live or music production in general and have £500 earmarked for a new DAW then knock yourself out, you won't be disappointed.

totally agree

Without a doubt.

February 6th for most businesses means midnight of that day, not midnight of the 5th.

Oh, and yes it's too dammed expensive. Reaper is proving that you can survive and do even really really well at 7X cheaper.
Live Standard new is $449, Reaper is $60. Latest version of Reaper has MPE, VST3 support, SysEx, and VCA faders to name a few things not in 10. I missed the upgrade "sale" so I think I'm buying Reaper, since new it's 5X cheaper than getting a few new features for Suite.

Reaper is also proving to be a better choice for collaboration, with support for NINJAM, and a price that a drummer or vocalist can afford. getting someone to spend $449 on software for a new project is daunting, $60 is easy. The vocalist I'm working with is picking up a copy too.

What Live has over Reaper at this point is it's simplicity, it's immediate gratification level, and Ableton would do well to figure out how to compete with them on the other fronts, because if Cockos ever hire a UI front end person that knows what they're doing it's going to be brutal. It will make Apples take over of the OSX market space with Logic seem like child's play.

I'm afraid I agree that the upgrade price is too steep. I'd not really been paying attention (though I've been using the beta) and it was a bit of a shock when I found out how much it is (for Suite, in my case). I do understand the need to support development of the software, and don't mind paying for updates (though they never seem to come at a good time, financially..), but this just seems a little too much, and the upgrade doesn't seem quite big enough to justify this.

I was Thinking upgrading. Now i am not
I already own Suite 9 and I have upgraded every edition since I bought Live 4 all those years ago. Im afraid Live 9 is where i will have to stay. I had accepted the price of £180 but it seems to have increased to £220 for suite 10. It seems a step too far for me.

the unknown wanderer wrote:I had accepted the price of £180 but it seems to have increased to £220 for suite 10. It seems a step too far for me.

When Ableton announced Live 10 last year they clearly stated that the lower price would be effective from the moment of the announcement until the moment that Live 10 released.

Don't be upset with them just because you didn't pay attention.

Add me to the list who I guess didn't pay attention, got countless EMails about buying Live 9 and then getting a free update to 10 but nothing at all registered with the discount of paying for the upgrade before the release...maybe because I've never seen that before and I own a lot of software.

Just logged in, checked the price to upgrade my Live 9 Suite to Live 10 suite and I honestly kept thinking there was an error on the site, like somehow it hadn't registered accordingly. $299 to upgrade my Live 9 Suite to Live 10 Suite. That's utterly pathetic pricing.

So you have Logic at $199 new. You have Reason with serious feature upgrades for free (VST support in 9.5) and a max of $129 for all upgrades from relatively previous versions. Really quite disappointed with Abelton, think a lot of folks will be sticking on 9.

yeah, the upgrade pricing is ridiculous. i've been a Live user since version 1, supporting its development for 17 years and this is the first time i will not be upgrading. £229 ! yet a mate of mine who's only been supporting Live's development for 3 years gets the upgrade from 9 Suite at the same price.

£100 would be fair enough for what's on offer, but £229 ? Nearly 43 % of the full entry price for a new suite user ? Even at the pre order price it was nearly 33% of full whack. No way.

I consider my upgrade pricing a big FU from Ableton so I will be returning the complement.....

stringtapper wrote:

the unknown wanderer wrote:I had accepted the price of £180 but it seems to have increased to £220 for suite 10. It seems a step too far for me.

When Ableton announced Live 10 last year they clearly stated that the lower price would be effective from the moment of the announcement until the moment that Live 10 released.

Don't be upset with them just because you didn't pay attention.

I think that was only half of his point. Live at $229 is still a bit more expensive than most DAWs in upgrade price, but at $299 it's clearly the most expensive upgrade price of any DAW out there.

That's where I'm still in shock about it... but I'm good. Realistically Live 5 was good enough for me, in that I use DP, Logic and now Reaper as main DAWs. Live has been for performance mainly and now that I'm back on Guitar for the most part it's possible to use Mainstage even. I would like to upgrade and support Ableton's development, but I have say flatly that Live has fallen behind Logic/Mainstage and Reaper in support for performance tools, namely MPE support. Live performance is not their focus now, you can see that in their advertising, they mainly cater to the bedroom electronic music producer, so I'm not that worried about upgrading.

Death by committee, it's what I feel is happening to Live, what was a DJ tool became a performance tool, then has spent years becoming a DAW. Comparing it to other DAWs without thinking about DJ or performance it doesn't look that great. Some parts are a breeze, others are a jumbled mess..