Ableton Forum

Dear Ableton folks,

First off, I need to tell you how much I love Live.
I've been using Live 3 for a year, and it has allowed
me to do some truly groundbreaking work -- live
multitracking of vocals and beatboxing -- that is
wowing tens of thousands of people around the USA.
Thank you, danke schoen, thank you.

So I eagerly paid the $150 to upgrade to Live 4,
hoping for performance improvements and new
features I could use.

Imagine my surprise when I found that a small
change in the software -- keyboard access to
launch quantization -- made Live 4 unusable for
me.

During my live show, I never touch the computer --
I control Live entirely through a MIDI foot controller,
which, when routed through a small utility called
MIDI Translator, sends keystroke commands to Live.
My arrangements, which are pretty complex, depend
on changing the launch quantization in the middle
of the song.

Live 3 allowed two ways to get at quantization via
keyboard: the menus (Alt-O-Q etc.), and shortcuts
(Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, etc.).

In Live 4 (4.0.2), both of those are gone! The only
way to change quantization is via mouse -- which I
can't do onstage. So I'm still using Live 3. $150
down the drain!

A search of the user forum reveals that this issue
came up during beta testing; Ableton's Gerhard
Behles said that the quantization keys were lost in
the course of changing the grid / snapping
functionality, and that you would look into putting
them in again.

Any thoughts on when this might happen?

I recognize that there are other fixes and changes
that must take a higher priority than this one. But it
does seem uncommon for keyboard shortcuts and
menus to be taken out in an upgrade. And until
they're put back in, I've paid $150 for an upgrade
I can't use.

Thanks again for an amazing piece of software.
Keep up the great work.


Sincerely...

Hello achaikin,

This feature will be mostlikely back again in the hopefully not so distant future. We had to leave it out for 4.0x because it interfered with other functionalities.

Best,
Ch. Kleine

kleine wrote: This feature will be mostlikely back again in the hopefully not so distant future.

Achaikin,

we at ableton are in a bit of a dilemma here. We already re-activated
keyboard shortcuts for the global quantization in our current development
version. They work only context-dependently, if the session view has the
focus, otherwise the same shortcuts apply to the grid in arranger and
MIDI editor.

However, to achieve this quite a bit of code had to be changed -- too
much code for this change to make it into a bugfix release. Our QA is
strict here: Changes which may compromise stability or other behaviour
are not released in bugfix versions but must undergo the Beta-test phase
of a major release.

I fully understand how annoying this feature loss is in your case. OTOH
using a MIDI-to-key translator tool to remote control Live is a thing we
propably never can to guarantee to work in future versions.. that would
be just too restricting.

So to come back to your question, the keyboard shortcuts will be in the
next Live update, but unfortunately this won't happen any time soon. Sorry
that we have to disappoint you here.

Stefan

Stefan,

Thanks for your prompt and detailed reply!

> we at ableton are in a bit of a dilemma here. We
> already re-activated keyboard shortcuts for the
> global quantization in our current development
> version. They work only context-dependently,
> if the session view has the focus, otherwise the
> same shortcuts apply to the grid in arranger and
> MIDI editor.

Two alternatives come to mind:

1) Now that Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, Ctrl-3 are being used
for the grid, how about Ctrl-Alt-1, Ctrl-Alt-2,
etc., for quantization? They don't seem to be
assigned at the moment.

2) And/or, just putting the quantization options
back in the *menu bar* would do the trick.
In Live 3, I can get One-Bar Quantization by
hitting Alt-O-Q-O: Options menu, Quantization
submenu, One-Bar. (I'm using the Windows
version, of course.) In Live 4, that submenu
is gone. Even without the Ctrl-1 Ctrl-2
keyboard shortcuts, it would seem that putting
the submenu back would be somewhat easy.

> I fully understand how annoying this feature loss
> is in your case. OTOH using a MIDI-to-key translator
> tool to remote control Live is a thing we propably
> never can to guarantee to work in future versions...
> that would be just too restricting.

Of course. But from my discussions with many other
artists who are using Live heavily onstage (in more
traditional ways than I am), having keyboard access
to functions is crucial. When you need 3 things to
happen before the next downbeat, a sequence of
keystrokes is going to be much quicker than mousing
around with a laptop touchpad and pulling down little
menus.

> So to come back to your question, the keyboard
> shortcuts will be in the next Live update, but
> unfortunately this won't happen any time soon.
> Sorry that we have to disappoint you here.

Next Live update... are we talking something like
Live 4.1, or something like Live 5?

Thanks again,