newbie questions

[JES]

Hi All,

I'm about to pick up Live for doing loop work on a multiprocessor Mac (synced to Digital Performer). I have no plans to go out into the world and perform on a laptop, and no plans to switch to PC for digital audio as I don't want to waste all the time I've spent learning how my MOTU gear does stuff. Live seems like the "Acid-killer" app for Mac, though, and I've been running SF Acid under Virtual PC for awhile now, so I'm psyched to move up.

Three questions:

1. Is the performance of Live any better under OS 9.2 than under OSX? I'm going to run 9.2 for all my audio apps anyway. I see a lot of complaints about mac performance. What's realistic to expect on a dual gig mac?

2. Do I have to turn off my 2nd processor to run Live?

3. I'm wondering about making loops -- do I need a stereo editor like Peak or something, or is Live good enough that I can basically play vinyl phrases or perform instrumental stuff right into it, clip it, and edit it?

Thanks!

--JES

[am0eba]

The only one of your questions I can help with is the one about editing. Live has very limited editing built it. You can set start virtual start and end points, and do "time-warping", but for most of the standard audio editing functions you need an external app. I picked up Spark LE, because it was inexpensive, and seemed pretty powerful. Live has a preference dialog where you can set your external editor, thus allowing you to do editing from within Live. Unfortunately, Spark is distributed in a bundled APP (application Program Package, I think?), which prevents Live from being able to see Spark in order to select it. To be fair, both Ableton and TC have provided workarounds to make this function, but I have yet to try either one.

Regards,
_Dave_

(Check out our Ableton and Reason tracks: http://mp3.com/ameebadood )