Beat Mashing - MLR/Molar/Mash style clip slicing on the fly. Slice to MIDI is great for pre-planned events, but if you want to improvise beat mashing a section you just recorded on the fly your options are limited and convoluted to set up. Maybe making the looper work with MIDI and allowing you to map each 1/8 or 1/4 note beat to a MIDI/Key value? Even better if it supports MIDI feedback so you can see your APC or PadKontrol scrolling along as the slices go by. Check out what Jeremy Ellis is doing with an MPC, or Pretty Lights or anyone using MLR...then imagine it's part of Live. How cool would that be?
Smart Knobs - expanding the effect chain idea to allow one knob to be assigned to multiple parameters and to allow polarity, min/max values, change points and log curves to define the motion. This would open up a world of possibility to live performers and DJs who want to create custom one knob effects, like Moldover made popular using Reaktor. A lot of people have workarounds but the all involve choppy results, special VSTs or outside applications. The Oneknob series of VSTs illustrates the same kind of effect, where certain values may increase or decrease at various points throughout a knob turn, often peaking at values other than full or zero and then receding to make room for another effect to come in. I think it would be awesome if you could create custom smart knobs in effect chains to simplify workflow and open up more knobs on your controllers for other uses.
Audio Overdub/MIDI Looper - in setting up my live performance workflow, I found that you can only set tempo by starting with a looper to begin your set or dialing it in or starting with tap tempo. This is painful as looper doesn't work on MIDI, and for a slew of reasons I don't want my MIDI tracks to be committed to audio, thus losing MIDI effect capability (I for instance have a knob mapped to a device chain so I can twist and reroute drums in Reason to get a cool effect). Looking at the other side of the spectrum, audio tracks could benefit a lot from clip overdub...sometimes looper isn't the right choice for musicians who rely more heavily on clip tracks. With a MIDI clip, I can clone it down a row and add another layer, but then return to the previous row to temporarily drop the overlay. For example, the first row may contain a simple drum kit beat, the second being a clone with the addition of hand drums and other complexity, but then I can return to the first clip when a simpler section calls for going back to to the basic beat. AFAIK this is impossible with Audio clips sans looper, unless you layer them in separate tracks, and the looper means I need an alternate workflow for audio and MIDI looping, since I use both controllers and guitar/bass/mic. I have my tracks divided into 8, which is perfect for controlling my loops using my APC, so I don't want to need to add tracks to layer audio clips.
Discreet Clips - wouldn't it be great to be able to record clips without the audience hearing, without stopping the previous clips in the process? Right now, I have 8 mirrored tracks...the first 8 in channel A, the next 8 in channel B. The reason I do this is so I can layer up clips using headphone cue and then switch using the crossfader. Say you build up a nice "A section" for your song, and then want to switch to your "B section" (verse to chorus, for example). Unless you have a band or pre-recorded samples, you have to start every section with one clip and build it up. This hardly makes for exciting changes in a song. If you could have the clips in row 1 playing while discreetly recording row 2, you could layer up the coming section in advance and then trigger the next row for a much more exciting transition.
Just my two cents, these ideas may have been expounded before but these three things would make my workflow so much better
. I currently use a lot of convoluted workarounds to achieve these things, (except smart knobs which I can't get to sound good using the workarounds I've seen), and I think it would be awesome if some of these features made it into Live.