Ableton Forum

I'm stoked, I've always though DP was probably the best choice of companion DAW to Live!

so, are virtual guitar pedals the new IT feature in DAWs?

DP looks cool... I probably would've gotten into it, if I hadn't gotten into Logic as my "other" DAW.

aqua_tek wrote:so, are virtual guitar pedals the new IT feature in DAWs?

DP looks cool... I probably would've gotten into it, if I hadn't gotten into Logic as my "other" DAW.

Yeah I guess guitar crap is the new DAW carrot on a stick, I would definitely expect something similar in Live 9 .

I started in DP, and I miss the MIDI quantize in it, best algorithms for 'fixing' MIDI out there IMO.
I've always liked Logic, but it's the worst for using live. DP is second to Live IMO, and in some ways more in tune with a full hour long set with multiple virtual instruments etc. Great compliment if you can wrap your head around it's very different approach to arranging sequences into songs, into "Song" sets etc.

Out of all these DAW features, this guitar thing should never appear in Live (and this is coming from a guitarist). This is the flavor of the month feature.

Please give us something useful like a comping feature that is really needed.

DP is a great application for recording and editing audio, but for midi and virtual instruments it sucks balls. I'd choose Live over DP for that any day. And as far as features are conserned, Logic to me seems like the best choise over all. Or is there a DAW with as many features for such a low price?

Audacity has quite a few features for the price.

Action Jackson wrote:DP is a great application for recording and editing audio, but for midi and virtual instruments it sucks balls. I'd choose Live over DP for that any day. And as far as features are conserned, Logic to me seems like the best choise over all. Or is there a DAW with as many features for such a low price?

Don't agree at all about the MIDI, like I said the quantize features in DP are far and above the best of the three mentioned DAWs.. I'm deeply familiar with all three, and DP is by far the best of the bunch MIDI wise, I would put Logic dead last simply because there's no way to lock the arming of a track in the arrange window, a simple selecting another track can disarm all of your soft synths and audio tracks. Plus, Logics MIDI arpeggiator sucks ass. All of Logics live MIDI filters require rewiring the track you want to filter with a midi environment object, where Live and DP have MIDI plug ins.

DP has the ability to host all plug ins in separate rack than the audio and MIDI for your sequences. This way you could load all the instruments for a set, and mute / un-mute on the fly while your audio/midi sequences play bellow. This allows for ultra fast rearrangement of tracks, and separates the set a lot more elegantly that what you would deal with in Logic or Live. Say you have a set of 12 songs with an average of 16 tracks per sequence, you would have 184 tracks in Live on the arrange or Session view, same in Logic. In DP you would have a Song list, with 12 songs arranged in the order of the set.

Point is DP is by far the second most logical choice for live performers, and considering how good the audio and midi features are an obvious partner for Live if you're on a mac. Logic is an awesome DAW, but it's not a good pairing with Live compared IMO and in my personal experience.

DP recently in 6 has surpassed Logic in software plug in track counts due to a really clever sort of variation on automatic freezing called pre-rendering.

The main thing that's hard to get used to in DP for most people is that it treats all MIDI as one long file, and therefore for selecting various parts of a sequence it's far more important to use markers.

I'd have to agree that dp has very deep midi editing capabilities..... Although one can't argue with the ease of live's work flow. I sat out the upgrade to dp6, but am eager to see what dp7 would offer.

So can you right click yet?

aisling wrote:I'd have to agree that dp has very deep midi editing capabilities..... Although one can't argue with the ease of live's work flow. I sat out the upgrade to dp6, but am eager to see what dp7 would offer.

A good workflow is exactly the thing that I think DP doesn't have MIDI-wise. No real time arpeggiator, for example. Arrrgh! Add a midi track and then an instrument track and route them and then arpeggiate and then you get someting done. In Live, drag and drop a VSTi, drag and drop an arp, tweak, and off you go.

And featurewise, the sampler in DP... What the hell? Live's sampler beats DP's sampler, no question about it. DP's softsynths are a joke. In both Live and Logic you get so much more (including better softsynths, samplers and 34GB of samples, in Logic).

And, btw, what I say about DP, it all applies to DP 5, which is what I use daily at work. I have no experience of DP 6 or DP 7.

EDIT: And no right-click in DP... SO ANNOYING!!!

Action Jackson wrote:A good workflow is exactly the thing that I think DP doesn't have MIDI-wise. No real time arpeggiator, for example. Arrrgh! Add a midi track and then an instrument track and route them and then arpeggiate and then you get someting done.

Instrument tracks in DP baffle me. Audio tracks armed for live input are much more flexible. Arm for recording, done. In live it's either bounce to disk or set up another audio track, route it etc. for each instrument track.

In Live, drag and drop a VSTi, drag and drop an arp, tweak, and off you go.

That's beside the point, you stated Logics MIDI was better, I disagree. Live has some cool MIDI features etc. but honestly if you're dealing with hardware, Live sucks. <-- I don't say that lightly, I love Live, but the MIDI sucks for sysex, sync and other hardware functions.

And featurewise, the sampler in DP... What the hell? Live's sampler beats DP's sampler, no question about it. DP's softsynths are a joke. In both Live and Logic you get so much more (including better softsynths, samplers and 34GB of samples, in Logic).

I don't think Simpler is that much better than the free sampler in DP, and I would definitely argue that MOTUs sampler for sale Mach V is far above Sampler in features and library. Logics EXSMKII is only as good as Sampler, the only advantage to the EXS is how fast it loads, and that it's free with Logic; the library is so so at best. Logics sampler also only has a single filter for the entire instance, just like Live's Sampler. Both are outgunned big time by Mach V and Kontakt <--- which is what prefer.

EDIT: And no right-click in DP... SO ANNOYING!!!

Just like in Logic, if you're not setting up global key commands the way you want DP to work, then you're not really using the UI advantages that those two DAWs have over Live. I set right click for resizing the windows, and the button on the scroll wheel for showing and hiding the tools.

Action Jackson wrote:
EDIT: And no right-click in DP... SO ANNOYING!!!

I hear and respect your points of view. I agree especially with this one. The vi's have been quite subpar.
Dysfunctionally, I am attached to DP. It is the first DAW where I was finally "producing" my own projects... (back in ver 2)
I have this nostalgic attachment...... Although the ease and simplicity and "flow" of live, breathed new life and muse into me when I had reached a "burn-out" stage in DP. I don't have any virtual guitar efx, and am curious about the stomp boxes emulations in dp7. This could be a cool feature to have access to.

No demo version (as usual) and MOTU's sucky support =

DP7 now officially on the MOTU site.
http://www.motu.com/products/software/dp/new-70.html

I still think DP is a great choice for a Live partner. A lot of features of traditional DAWs Live will probably never see that some of us find useful, like event lists, notation, advanced MIDI, dual monitor support, sysex support, a streamlined way of containing hour long sets of individual songs etc. and comparing the telephone support to Apple??? it's at least not $500+ for the service! I'm taking the plunge.

DP & live in rewire is really what its all about, I do all my original production in DP and just use live in rewire and for performing live, but I will skip this version of DP as I just got Komplete 5 and guitar rig as a part of it so I will not need any of the new stuff fx wise. feature wise there are a few cool new things there but nothing really significant to want to upgrade. Live 8 here I finally come