Ableton Forum

Sorry if this answer is obvious but I have a friend who composes the 'traditonal' way with music notation who wants to get some music software. I know there are programs like Sibelius that are out there, but does anyone know if there's a way to incorporate Ableton into this without buying 2 expensive pieces of software? (Eg. A plugin or something)

there's some m4l/max stuff out there but in my opinion (as a music reader/writer myself) if I wanted to write music the proper way I would go with one of the packages that incorporates scores properly - Live has no such functionality

If you use any software to notate the music, there is no reason why you cannot have that application send the midi data into Live using internal midi ports and play Live's own instruments or third party VST/AU's. These are built into OSX, but if you are a Windows user, installing Midiyoke will provide the necessary internal midi ports. You will have 16 midi channels per midi port - Midiyoke provide 8 ports I believe, so that would be 128 instruments. OSX can provide even more than that. That's one way of doing it...

But do you think Live's built in instruments warrant such complexity, latency and instability?

If you have to buy the other sequencer then you can just run its own internal sounds and use vst plugs from the score enabled sequencer.

I think cubase has score writing capabilities and it has similar built-ins to Live.

You could use MuseScore (free), Crescendo (free), Finale Notepad (limited in free version), or Sibelius if you have the cash and are a pro (IMHO users of Sibelius are not your average joe music writers). But then you'd just export out the MIDI file(s) and load them into Live or MIDIYoke or other option. But Live has NO scoring capabilities and not all DAW's have this as well. Some may have it in a limited capacity but I don't know any (i.e. haven't used them) that have a full blown ability to do this.

Studio One V2 has multi-track editing abilities for MIDI itself but not scoring (it's a feature request but doubt it'll go in natively). Live's MIDI editing capability is lacking a lot of what others have (FL, Logic, Cubase) from what I've read in the recent past on MIDI in other forums. I think Live really needs to expand this part of Live....

Mike

hi

if they don't have plans yet to incorporate this,
how bout adding a button that would you to open a external
program (muscore) to do this like they have with
audio editors

devobtch

ian_halsall wrote:But do you think Live's built in instruments warrant such complexity, latency and instability?

If you have to buy the other sequencer then you can just run its own internal sounds and use vst plugs from the score enabled sequencer.

I think cubase has score writing capabilities and it has similar built-ins to Live.

I wouldn't do it myself as I own Logic and don't care that much for Live's built in stuff, but it is an option if you really want to use Live (which is what I understood from the OP's message). I have routed between DAW's internally plenty of times before and it is quite stable once audio is turned off on the application that is solely transmitting MIDI. I was really just putting it out there as a viable option! Saving the score as a MIDI file is another good alternative, though if you load into Live and then want to edit, it could become tedious.

oneder wrote:http://www.computermusicnotation.com/

Interesting but the device appears to be *free* as most Max patches are but you have to pay for this java license? $53 for Java enabled ability and $50 for it not enabled? I don't know if that's worth it to me personally but it seems interesting. I may read up more on that to have more information to determine if it's worth it to me or not (at this point - no).

Thanks for the link!

Mike

Adding scoring would inflate the price of many DAWs. Live already excels in that. Some DAWs are like Cubase better at handling certain VSTs like the Play engine.
I find it easier export midi from notation software for DAWs that don't have scoring.

If it comes to orchestra work, Live and Reason would last on my list for such things. The piano rolls for editing complex work are clumsy. This is where apps like Cubase and Sonar are much better.

Depends on the music the op's friend is writing. The post implies he/she is using pen and paper to write notation.... I doubt this person is hearing synths, reverbs, delays etc... I have no idea why you would be looking at Live as a companion to a notation program.