To Ableton representatives: please, share Ableton roadmap

[Angstrom]

As an example of a rival company talking more freely, and interestingly, without giving too much away. Compare this
http://blog.steinberg.net/

to this
https://www.ableton.com/en/blog

Steinberg's developer blog is a fascinating and reassuring insight into a company's creative technical staff at work. Seeing the real people talking normally about the product they are making gives me a warm feeling. They are making a strong connection with their customers through open honest explanations of their thoughts and actions.

Meanwhile - Ableton's blog is a marketing parade. "DJ CelebrityEndorzm3ntal teaches you sum mad breaks!! MC Marketin team iz outa control "! Buy a pack, buy a loop, buy,buy,buy!

There are some really interesting & intelligent people working at Ableton, all with unique skills and outlooks on music technology, which I'm betting we are all interested in . But I challenge you to find one of them talking about the subject, the app they make & we use, on the Ableton site.

I picture the people working on the application as prisoners of the marketing team. "Uh no, you can't talk about the development process, it's soooo boring. Filters and stuff? Yawn yawn yawn. Do you know any famous people!? Did I tell you about the time I met Beyonce? "

[re:dream]

From the steinberg blog

In my last update I described the high-level design of the musical brain at the heart of our application: lots of individual engines performing single tasks, some dependent on one another, others running independently. This design approach allows us to break down the immensely complex problem of how to correctly notate and lay out music into smaller, more manageable chunks, and also provides the opportunity for these little engines to be designed and implemented independently, and eventually to run in parallel (unless an engine is dependent on the output of another engine, of course).

In other words... they're, um, writing software

Our goals are to put the most important tools at your fingertips without overwhelming you with screen after screen of buttons and toolbars. At the same time, we want the application to use as few pop-up dialog boxes as possible, so that you are interacting directly with the score itself as much as possible, with few interruptions.

In other words, they want an easy to use interface.

It seems just like 90% of most blogs out there, i.e. the actual information content is very low, but it kind of raises their profile.

[andydes]

What we really need is some kind of an official public feature request tracker, with formal voting/petition features.

It should be moderated by an ableton employee who would handle merging duplicates (and merging votes) on features requests.

This really needs to be a more formal process to make us users feel like we are actually being listened to.

Right now great ideas, and real momentum on important issues are just getting lost in the noise of this open ended forum.

This way we, as users, could see, for example, that 90% of the people really wanted feature X as a top priority...and we can have confidence that ableton knows what we want, and we can assume that they are working to address the issues.

Anyone agree?

No, sorry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee

[Valery_Kondakoff]

Unfortunately, nothing changed in the recent four years. We still don't know anything about Ableton development, planned enhancements, release dates.
And, by the way, looks like _none_ of the high voted user suggestions from Ableton suggestions tracker on Centercode was implemented during this period.
I'm pretty sure this is wrong!

[Stromkraft]

Unfortunately, nothing changed in the recent four years. We still don't know anything about Ableton development, planned enhancements, release dates.
And, by the way, looks like _none_ of the high voted user suggestions from Ableton suggestions tracker on Centercode was implemented during this period.
I'm pretty sure this is wrong! :(

Yeah, as if automation delay compensation wasn't on there.

[doghouse]

What other DAW mfrs tell us what's coming? A few of them offer betas a month or two before release but other than that new releases are total surprises. Bitwig has mentioned a few things mainly because they were importnat features missing from the initial release

The real problem with a roadmap is if for some reason a planned feature doesn't work out, then you get irate customers screaming about how they need it.

I once worked at an electronics company that pulled the plug on a product that had been on their roadmap for three years. The sales guys already had preorders (some over a year old) and had to go tell the customers the product would never ship. On top of that they also announced they were killling the entire product family and dropping all tech support in 30 days. This was for hardware boxes that cost 5 to 6 figures!

The reason the product never shopped was that two years after completing all the hardware, the software still didn't work and there was no end in sight, so the company chose to pull the plug and eat the cost of five years of development. As you might expect it was a total disaster, the company went from profitable to being in the red for a decade until they were finally purchased by a competitor.

[Machinesworking]

What I find most interesting about this is Ableton is still on Live 9..
I can't think of any software I own, especially DAW wise, that has been so long without a paid upgrade?

[yonhorizon]

Dont know why they still keep the feature request page on the forum.
A daw that doesnt support 4k
No mousewheel
No custom shortcuts
No cincere communication with the users
Feels like deadware
Look how loved reaper is. Because it feels communal. Very alive with two sided communication.
Look at the pace of bitwig, studio one.

I use abe only because of push.
Probably thats the thing that keeps them floating

[Martin Gifford]

Dont know why they still keep the feature request page on the forum.
A daw that doesnt support 4k
No mousewheel
No custom shortcuts
No cincere communication with the users
Feels like deadware
Look how loved reaper is. Because it feels communal. Very alive with two sided communication.
Look at the pace of bitwig, studio one.

I use abe only because of push.
Probably thats the thing that keeps them floating

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[H20nly]