Just installed 8b17beta @ 11pm.
Here's what I notice off the bat (first 15 min's):
A lot of percentage ranges seem to go from 0 to
200%. Does that really make sense?!?!? Why not max at 100%? This reminds me of amps that go to '11'. HA HA
WARPING -- whoa. I already read about it in the forums. True, it doesn't work the same at all. Harsh for users of Live for years now, no? Instead of markers moving around wavs, my wavs now flow around the markers. I don't like this. Should be an option -- wave warps to markers, or markers move around waves. Or maybe a preference. (My Opinion.)
Warping does really weird thing to my vocal beat 'beats' warp I quickly made. It seesm to have added a duplicate wave bit. Strange.
Colors -- nice to have, nice to have more, but to me not that important. More colors. Wow. Yawn. renaminging my samples is important, but the colors is not a huge deal for me.
Just noticed -- the fonts don't show up on dark colors! Ooops! Think they need an 'invert font color' checkbox.
Also tried changing
theme -- nothing has light colored text. Is that a coding flaw? Why go 'midnight' if you can't read any samples?!?!? Add option to invert colored fonts!
Vocoder -- always wanted one. Don't think it was this one. Doesn't do what I want. Ran thru the presets. No 'sound like a robot' preset, no 'play music with voice' option. Maybe this exists as a rack? (Should be a RACK then.) Feels more like a fancy equalizer. I'd rather see different options for tweaking, like a knob moving from 'male - female' vocal qualities, or 'high voice - low voice' (pitch shift), alien, robot, etc. Or at least some presets like that. Formant( is this a musical term?) is a strange option name (why not frequency), etc. Hey, just saw that you can adjust "gate, bands, range, level' from the chart, etc.
The changeability here is not clear -- but with some tweaks, it sounds better. Sorta.
Multiband Dynamics -- I think this is what I was asking for ages ago w/mastermix fix. Looks like a way to master my Live mix better and get a punchy final track. Haven't fine tuned, just a first impression. Older versions of Ableton seem to need more punch on final mix. (My friends use Bias Peak, or some just add more compression to final out.) I read about eq'ing out all non-audible frequencies on each track. Have tried. Didn't seem to do much for me.
Limiter -- actually a compression / gain / limiter. Another much needed thing in Ableton -- compression that doesn't ever spike to red! So I added it to my vocal beats, and took myself right up near the red. Then later I was tweaking the actual wave form, dramatically raised gain on original loop -- happy to see I did not redline, and the audio quality of the beatbox shifted w/o blowing out the gain. GOOD EFFECT ... wrong name. Call it NOBLOWOUT. HA HA
Looper -- is this like 8 instances of 'triggers' from a modular audio system? FL Studio or similar? Another strange GUI. Did not work when I set to resample my audio beat from another track. Will have to play with it.
Can't get
Audio Effect Racks to load onto any tracks.
Frequency Shifter -- overdue. Looks nice. Yep, I love it. Basic, but needed to move out of sample tweaking section. But I still see transpose is an option there. I was surprised on older Liver versions that playing back and 'tweaking' transpose (from Sample edit) gave me a ton of transposed - separate - mini-clips. This is a good fix!
Spectrum - Love this utility from v7, but needs a bunch of enhancements... like... in addition to breaking up spectrum blocks, why not color code each track and show them overlaid? Add and remove different tracks? What about phase issues? While I like this, it doesn't seem to clearly show accurately when my tracks are completely 'off' certain bandwidths.
My fav 3rd party plugin is a 3D audio simulation which shows sort of where my frequences are coming from at different points (IXL Stereo Analyzer).
I added Spectrum to the Master Track. Clicked on another track &
it goes away!! Aaaaggghghhh. I was hoping that would end in v8 (or sooner). There's NO WAY to get an effect to stay viewable while viewing other tracks?!?!? Should be an option selection for any/all effects that we'd like to tweak on the fly -- a 'keep visible' checkbox or 'add to visible' track fx or something? I like that all pieces of vst effects are tweakable in V8 for plugins -- but still hard to find the pieces (for me?).
Overall, sound is clearer than I recall on v5 or v7. Sounds crisper.
Will be investigating further, but thought I'd notify first impressions.
Would I upgrade??? Hmmm... Probably not for awhile. Frankly, I was blown away by Ableton 4, wound up buying v5 which had some cool stuff, and with v7 I felt I might have more than I needed on-board (but I wanted EIC so I did it). Not sure about v8. So I'm not sure at this point. I really like the motif of
SIMPLE.
For me, Ableton v7 is more complex in many ways than what I might want.
** Ableton programming geniuses, have you considered making more and more modules that work with all versions of Ableton Live? Maybe 'finalizing' a framework for awhile? Maybe even release source code for other developers, that kind of thing? That might be another way of expanding your business ... rather than redoing the whole framework when the original framework was already quite robust AND fun. Just an idea.*
THANKS - PEACE - Ari = rekzkarz = rekz