Hi,
I'm writing here as a Live owner, not as a user. I made several attempts with different versions to use Live on stage in the last five years, but I always ended up reverting to Cubase due to the lack of some crucial features in Live. The latest version I have is 7, so I don't know what the new features in v8 are and more importantly I don't know what can be done in Max for Live (which came out after my last experiments with Live) in order to get the features I need. I'd very much appreciate if some of the active users with up-to-date knowledge helped me with an update on some of them:
I. Handling clips as patterns were handled in any old school sequencer:
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 a song has a verse that's 12 bars long, it should always be 12 bars, no matter when the next clip is triggered or what the quantize value is.
II. Customizable display
Watching a revolving pie chart with a diameter of 4mm is surely NOT what you'd like to see on a proper stage with lighting (especially not with a large band, where the musicians have LCD monitors on the floor, like we have). 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 we want to see is a LARGE AND SIMPLE display that gives 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 ("clips") on a timeline. The screens are visible on some shots of these live videos here: http://endrehuszar.com/index.php?p=medi ... d=0&lang=2
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.
III. Mute groups in the mixer
Assigning notes or CCs to each track is not an alternative, because midi controllers are usually unable to send out dozens of CCs or notes in one command and the drum trigger controllers I use to control Live are no exception to that.
The easiest solution would be if the channel mutes could be assigned to multiple remote commands, allowing tracks to belong to multiple mute groups.
I found a workaround (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfm2PG4TWNc), but it would be great to have a simpler solution within Live, without having to rely on MIDIYoke.