Ableton Forum

Ableton upgrades used to be the best as they gave educational discounts, meaning I could afford to upgrade Live 6 to Live 7 Suite without too much pain, as a qualifying educational status. Removing this discount is still something that rankles with me and something which I still believe is a poor business decision.

However, the Live 7 Suite to Live 8 Suite cost with no educational discount available any more was 229 dollars download version. This is a significant amount and one would expect that this cost will not decrease on the next upgrade. Given that the next upgrade is likely to happen within 12-18 months, Live is becoming a very expensive tool. Not to mention that Max For Live will cost several hundred dollars and will probably add to the upgrade costs next time too.... As much as I love Live, I fear that they do risk losing some of their customer base with these pricing policies.

I upgraded Cubase SX3 to C5, a 2 generation upgrade for only $199. Having done this, I couldn't afford the Live upgrade. Perhaps I will upgrade at Live 9, Live 7.0.16 runs fine for me right now. I did enjoy Live 8 Suite in beta testing though, so it's a pity that the recession is limiting my choices here as I would like to upgrade.

Thanks for helping leisuremuffin...

leedsquietman wrote: the Live 7 Suite to Live 8 Suite cost was 229 dollars download version.

yeah that was the info I needed. so really it is not that bad. $40 more than upgrading the non-suite version (for me anyway...) so I guess I will pony up that extra 40$ every year to upgrade the suite....

leedsquietman wrote: Not to mention that Max For Live will cost several hundred dollars and will probably add to the upgrade costs next time too....

yep yep yep... really from Live4 to Live8 + all the bells and whistles that's getting to be a fair amount of cash. In not that much time... so it may be reasonable to pass over some versions... I never could, but now I could stay with 7, as it does what I need, but again I won't be able to resist... even as I have been resisting for some weeks


thanks a lot you 2 guys!

Bear in mind that you don't actually need to upgrade from Suite to a new version of Suite unless there is some new instrument or something that you want. All the instruments you get with Suite 8 would be upgraded to their latest versions even if you only updated to plain Live 9.

For example, the only reason for someone to buy Suite 8 rather than Live 8 if they already owned Suite 7, was so that they could get access to Collision/Corpus and Latin Percussion. They would have got all the upgrades to Operator, Sampler etc even if they only upgraded to Live 8.