Three things that should already exist... (Long post)

[hungaristan]

Although I think they should already exist, I hope that maybe in v10 or v15 they will...

I. Ability to handle clips as indivisible units

When I started my first experiments with Live around 3 years ago, I couldn't believe that it was not capable of handling clips as an indivisible unit, meaning that the clip would always play until the end, regardless of the quantize value and the time when the next clip gets triggered on the same track.

This is something that even the first pattern based hardware sequencers could do 30 years ago and it's a musically very useful behaviour: if there's a verse that's 12 bars long, it should be 12 bars under any conditions and no-one would ever want to break it up in the seventh bar and start playing another part of the song.

In order to avoid any totally unmusical mess, most musicians who I discussed this issue with use low quantize values like 1 bar, because it's an easy rule to remember that the next clip/scene always has to be triggered during the last bar of a specific part of the song. It works, but it's not very convenient though, because the last bar of these parts often tend to be very busy (drum breaks etc.) and sometimes it's difficult to find a free limb or finger to trigger the next event (especially for a drummer like myself). There's also a costly alternative that uses the legato mode, but it's very resource consuming and I'd find it risky to use it on stage for a large set with many long clips.

I received many helpful suggestions here to tackle this issue, but unfortunately they all had some weak points.

II. Customizable display

Another thing that was hard to cope with when I finally made a decision to switch to Live on stage was the lack of a customizable display. I think if an app is called Live, the developers should have thought of what a stage environment is like and this should reflect in the GUI somehow. Watching a revolving pie chart with a diameter of 4mm in order to see where we are is surely NOT what you'd like to have on a proper stage with lighting (especially not with a large band, where the musicians have LCD monitors on the floor). It might work well in a small club where you can put the computer right in your face, but I'd even doubt that.

All you want to see in such an environment is a LARGE AND SIMPLE display that gives you a clear indication of the playback position. In our practice we used a large time display in a bars.beats format and large colour-coded blocks that represented different parts of the song and it was easy to follow how the cursor moved on top of these blocks even from a distance.

In case of Live, where there's no sequential playback order, it would be a great help if a track could be chosen as the reference track and that pathetic little pie chart of the currently playing clip on that track could be magnified. It's just an idea, but I'm sure there would many options to provide some usable info to players, who are more than 50 cm away from the screen.

III. Ability to handle complex remote commands

Because there are so many possibilities in Live and the range of various applications is so wide, it would be great to have some means to handle complex commands which could then be triggered with single remote control messages (like Native Instrument's KSP). This would ideally include conditional (if/then/else) commands, loops etc.

(To give you a simple example that I've recently encountered was that even very basic tasks like sending a single command to mute a group of tracks, regardless of their mute state is not possible today, because the mute switches are toggles and their state cannot be retrieved, so the remote control messages would not know whether the track is already muted or not.)