Ableton Forum

Abes needs to drop out of the daw thingy and into more innovate creative composing. Pro tools is stretching audio in a very great sounding and reliable way. But Live has it all over PT for fast composing and instant creative freak-outs. New features need to be mostly creative features and they should stop making work-arounds a god-damn feature!!. Live will always suck as a daw. 8 will be a yawn, marketing will get the money.

Help us write Abes, build on your strengths and leave the weaknesses behind.

knotkranky wrote:Abes needs to drop out of the daw thingy and into more innovate creative composing. Pro tools is stretching audio in a very great sounding and reliable way. But Live has it all over PT for fast composing and instant creative freak-outs. New features need to be mostly creative features and they should stop making work-arounds a god-damn feature!!. Live will always suck as a daw. 8 will be a yawn, marketing will get the money.

Help us write Abes, build on your strengths and leave the weaknesses behind.

well put

Always looking forward for a new version of Live. Lots of things needs to be fixed in terms of functionality like the 128 parameters thingy and you know the rest.

Now I tend to use live most of the time to improvise on the fly without nothing prepared and nothing seems to beat it at that. So now I wish for more live stuff like a looper effect (synced or not) for instance. More emphasis on the live side of it which makes it unique.

DAW functionality is always appreciated but might as well buy something like Cubase or Sonar which have been doing it for so long. I just hope they don't give in to the demand of the music industry like most softs seems to be heading. Plenty of DJs or musicians that can benefit from using Live.

Poster wrote: so i.m.o. alot of the 'simplicity' will return when the interface radically changes at certain places..

spot on

Poster wrote:but my main wish/hope is for full arrange>session (and vice versa) integration..
if content between those two could be fully interchangeable......

+1

if they eliminate the vst parameter limit and get some beizer curve automation, track folders, and cross fades going I'll be super stoked. But without that vst parameter limit gone, live is completely useless to me.

forge wrote:we need, BIG ROUND Obvious controls, not endless fiddly, visually indistinguishable mazes

I was just thinking about Max' 5 presentation mode where you just build yourself a neat custom interface for complex matters..

Now if you look at the racks we all agree that those 8 macros are a laugh..
And adding 16, 32, 128, 512 more macros ain't going to help I'm afraid.. it even makes it worse and complex..

What we need is a user customizable rack interface..
That way you can have as complex and deep rack layers as you want and actually control it with a personal macro section interface that makes sense to YOU..
The current generic 8 macro dial lay-out never really worked for me..

So;
you want 1 big dial to fill the whole macro section? do it..
you want faders instead of dials? drag em in..
bi-polar macro dials to match bi-polar device parameters? no prob..
on/off buttons, toggle buttons, faders, dials, value boxes, divider lines, X/Y pads, etc, etc..

If we can lay-out to our own needs, in a macro section that can be as big as we want, you hardly have to dig deep into those layers anymore..
Make a disctinct ADSR section, a pitch section, etc, etc, all so it makes sense to you..
Think signal path lay-out on a synth; that's also a great help.. dedicated sections, separated by some space to keep oversight..

Or how about macro short-cut link buttons; link a button (bookmark) to a device 10 rack layers deep, press it, and instantly go to that device..
Now press CTRL+B and go back to where you were, almost like how a webpage interacts..
Or how about an interactive schematic overview of the rack' inner guts? Like Analog's signal path routing..

One big user macro interface could give back some simplicity i.m.o.

forge wrote:

knotkranky wrote:Abes needs to drop out of the daw thingy and into more innovate creative composing. Pro tools is stretching audio in a very great sounding and reliable way. But Live has it all over PT for fast composing and instant creative freak-outs. New features need to be mostly creative features and they should stop making work-arounds a god-damn feature!!. Live will always suck as a daw. 8 will be a yawn, marketing will get the money.

Help us write Abes, build on your strengths and leave the weaknesses behind.

well put

I guess they would lose money if they went in that direction. I would like to believe they wouldn't in the long run. Why play the field when you can stick-out for being different. They're different anyway! Their bored of directors must be a poncy little group of penny loafer loafs.

Poster wrote:
What we need is a user customizable rack interface..

Very interesting suggestions! I'd love these customisable racks.

Make a post in the wishlist!

knotkranky wrote:

forge wrote:

knotkranky wrote:Abes needs to drop out of the daw thingy and into more innovate creative composing. Pro tools is stretching audio in a very great sounding and reliable way. But Live has it all over PT for fast composing and instant creative freak-outs. New features need to be mostly creative features and they should stop making work-arounds a god-damn feature!!. Live will always suck as a daw. 8 will be a yawn, marketing will get the money.

Help us write Abes, build on your strengths and leave the weaknesses behind.

well put

I guess they would lose money if they went in that direction. I would like to believe they wouldn't in the long run. Why play the field when you can stick-out for being different. They're different anyway! Their bored of directors must be a poncy little group of penny loafer loafs.

yeah but they have the Live market pretty much sown up - I think they'd be fine

as someone mentioned earlier, they gave up trying to make Live a DAW replacement, because they realised in many ways it will always fall short

I know I was attracted to it when it was a 'sequencer instrument' - like a musical instrument you play, then use something else to mix it

I'm not saying I want to go back to that, just that if the real time and compositional side to it was the best it could possibly then it would be worth working around the DAW shortcomings

there are already so many DAWs it's much easier to make up for lacking features there, but there is nothing like Live in the real-time performance side of things so we have to just wait for Ableton there - doesnt make sense really

Poster wrote:

forge wrote:we need, BIG ROUND Obvious controls, not endless fiddly, visually indistinguishable mazes

I was just thinking about Max' 5 presentation mode where you just build yourself a neat custom interface for complex matters..

Now if you look at the racks we all agree that those 8 macros are a laugh..
And adding 16, 32, 128, 512 more macros ain't going to help I'm afraid.. it even makes it worse and complex..

What we need is a user customizable rack interface..
That way you can have as complex and deep rack layers as you want and actually control it with a personal macro section interface that makes sense to YOU..
The current generic 8 macro dial lay-out never really worked for me..

So;
you want 1 big dial to fill the whole macro section? do it..
you want faders instead of dials? drag em in..
bi-polar macro dials to match bi-polar device parameters? no prob..
on/off buttons, toggle buttons, faders, dials, value boxes, divider lines, X/Y pads, etc, etc..

If we can lay-out to our own needs, in a macro section that can be as big as we want, you hardly have to dig deep into those layers anymore..
Make a disctinct ADSR section, a pitch section, etc, etc, all so it makes sense to you..
Think signal path lay-out on a synth; that's also a great help.. dedicated sections, separated by some space to keep oversight..

Or how about macro short-cut link buttons; link a button (bookmark) to a device 10 rack layers deep, press it, and instantly go to that device..
Now press CTRL+B and go back to where you were, almost like how a webpage interacts..
Or how about an interactive schematic overview of the rack' inner guts? Like Analog's signal path routing..

One big user macro interface could give back some simplicity i.m.o.

I agree

actually take the pad view for drum racks for example - I like it, but I actually find the drum racks fiddly to work with

so what I would probably like to do ideally is use a group track instead, so I'd have all my drum sounds on normal tracks, group them all together and just stick a drum pad interface plug-in on the track to control it - and there's your short cut/bookmarks too!! Of course maybe the simplest way to do that would be to add routing options to normal drum racks so you could put one on the group track and route the Pads to the tracks within the drum rack - because you'd have to do all the routing somehow

that way you'd still have the clips, main sends and track delay on each one, but you could still hide them all in the group track

that would have been about a million times simpler than the drum racks + inline rack mixer

I mean I think drum racks needed doing, especially for including content, but in reality the method I described would be far easier to work with

but as you said earlier, if the GUI was updated to cope with all the changes over time then maybe it would be different

but you can guarantee, if we get group tracks (especially if they can be saved like racks) then I'd probably not use drum racks any more, especially if I could use the pad view on tracks

Happy here with live 5

Poster wrote:I was just thinking about Max' 5 presentation mode where you just build yourself a neat custom interface for complex matters..

Now if you look at the racks we all agree that those 8 macros are a laugh..
And adding 16, 32, 128, 512 more macros ain't going to help I'm afraid.. it even makes it worse and complex..

What we need is a user customizable rack interface..
That way you can have as complex and deep rack layers as you want and actually control it with a personal macro section interface that makes sense to YOU..
The current generic 8 macro dial lay-out never really worked for me..

So;
you want 1 big dial to fill the whole macro section? do it..
you want faders instead of dials? drag em in..
bi-polar macro dials to match bi-polar device parameters? no prob..
on/off buttons, toggle buttons, faders, dials, value boxes, divider lines, X/Y pads, etc, etc..

If we can lay-out to our own needs, in a macro section that can be as big as we want, you hardly have to dig deep into those layers anymore..
Make a disctinct ADSR section, a pitch section, etc, etc, all so it makes sense to you..
Think signal path lay-out on a synth; that's also a great help.. dedicated sections, separated by some space to keep oversight..

Or how about macro short-cut link buttons; link a button (bookmark) to a device 10 rack layers deep, press it, and instantly go to that device..
Now press CTRL+B and go back to where you were, almost like how a webpage interacts..
Or how about an interactive schematic overview of the rack' inner guts? Like Analog's signal path routing..

One big user macro interface could give back some simplicity i.m.o.

Amen. I love every one of those ideas. I am really crossing my fingers that the Ableton/Cycling '74 partnership is going to result in this kind direction in future versions of Live.

I agree that they need to keep the focus on what makes the app unique, it being an instrument for live performance. But I don't really see how all of the added features in the last couple of versions have made anything worse. Seems to me that if you don't like or need a certain feature it's not that hard to ignore it. The comment about Live 3 is weird because you can use 7 exactly the same way you used 3 can't you? There are many added features from the last couple of versions that I've never gotten around to using because I'm still writing music using features from version 4. To me the interface is pretty much as simple as it's always been.

I'm not eagerly anticipating Live 8, but when it does come, hopefully they will have fixed all the bugs from Live 7 and got the top 4 or 5 requested features for Live 8 working (not to mention whatever they have planned with c74).

I would like to see more DAW like features implemeted so I can finally put Cubase to bed, including crossfading audio clips on the same track on arrange, an end to the 128 parameter limit, proper dual monitor support, and automation for session view etc and a better time stretching algorithm such as Sonique Pro as used in Reaper and PT.

I think racks are pretty much fine as they are for my needs, maybe doubling the amount of macros is a good compromise. Everyone has their own need, being that I rarely use Live on stage as a performance tool, but more as a home studio compositional tool and as a mainstream DAW the need to have some Reaktor like custom controller touch screen with dozens of little boxes and squiggly lines lines up to a big metal box with a bunch of knobs and sliders is not how I use Live.

I think this is the problem Ableton have. I'm not a hardcore Live user who has been around since the pre midi days of Live 4, I was only interested from Live 6 when they started to seriously implement the DAW tools I was familiar and comfortable with after years of using Cubase. Ableton have a split camp and providing a good workable update for both camps is not easy.

stringtapper wrote: Seems to me that if you don't like or need a certain feature it's not that hard to ignore it. The comment about Live 3 is weird because you can use 7 exactly the same way you used 3 can't you? There are many added features from the last couple of versions that I've never gotten around to using because I'm still writing music using features from version 4. To me the interface is pretty much as simple as it's always been.

I guess you haven't got much into racks then or tried the inline rack mixer?

racks (esp drum racks) have got way deep and the problem is more navigating around and seeing where you are - the problem as Poster said is that the GUI hasn't changed as more things have been added

even just track and scene colours would make a big difference here, as well as vertically resizeable racks (I think that + group tracks would have been much better than the in-line rack mixer idea)

the multi-automation thing is really hard to work with too because you have to either expand all at once or one at a time - there should be 'show automation for device in lanes' or something, and it always feels like I should be able to double click on a lane and jump to the parameter it is automating so I can see it visually as knobs etc

Live 3 was kind of a special stage in Live's history because they introduced clip envelopes, which was a stroke of genius, and there were actually a few debates going round at the time about whether they should even add MIDI - we used to use things like Ploge Bidule or FLStudio to get VSTIs into Live and there was something great about working with the audio in that way - it was the simplicity that made it great - Live itself was one big sampler rather than a host for other samplers, and that meant you used it in a certain way

I'm not saying I want it to go back that way ( I can always load up Live 3!) - in fact I'd say I'm probably 80% happy with Live now, it's just that 20% is really infuriating workflow things that can really spoil the flow sometimes

this all probably sounds big and dramatic when really I'd say most of what has been added to Live is really great and I always have a lot of faith in the way Ableton do things, but really when racks were introduced it was time to start rethinking the GUI because it just doesn't all fit in comfortably any more

so for this reason, to me the absolute priorities are in 2 big areas - GUI/navigation, and automation

1. GUI/Navigation - things like dual monitor support with savable screen set ups, coloured tracks and scenes, more 2 way navigation like double clicking a parameter and being taken to where it is mapped to etc, selecting devices via MIDI for instant mapping - things like that could make an enormous difference

2. Automation: the ever elusive session automation, a way to record automation and clips separately, Back to arrange buttons per track, bezier curves and a better way to alter breakpoints (like constrain direction modifier so that the point doesn't move up and down when you are trying to move left/right etc)

personally I really want alias clips so that I am always working on the same clip in session/arrange - and in that case I'd use the clip envelopes rather than arrange automation, or be able to choose to display the clip envelopes in arrange - I'd like to be able to choose them to be one and the same - no more relative/absolute - just automation on the one clip that plays in both views

so there you go, I don't ask much!