Ableton Forum

Does anyone know the status of Ableton Live on the new MacOS Big Sur and if there's been any work done on bringing Live to work natively on the brand new Apple silicon, M1?

Big Sur should work, but for now the Mac specs (also Live 11) say Intel.

GusHage wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 10, 2020 6:41 pm

Does anyone know the status of Ableton Live on the new MacOS Big Sur and if there's been any work done on bringing Live to work natively on the brand new Apple silicon, M1?

Really looking forward about both the release date of a ARM port and, beforehand, Live 10 performance using Rosetta.

Seeing as how the M1 Macs just dropped yesterday and Big Sur finally drops tomorrow, I wouldn't be expecting anything until next year.

doghouse wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 11, 2020 6:16 pm

Seeing as how the M1 Macs just dropped yesterday and Big Sur finally drops tomorrow, I wouldn't be expecting anything until next year.

On the other hand, the dev kits have been available for a couple of months now...

yes, would be nice to get a word from Ableton how much of a challenge this is going to be for them, for people considering purchasing new Laptops this and next year.

As well as software the M1 Macs are going to need hardware drivers. It will be interesting to see how many manufacturers provide suitable drivers - if they even provide drivers for older hardware at all - and when.

My answer to the conundrum was a 2020 i9 iMac on the grounds it’s usable now and should be for some time. And when it’s no longer supported, well I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

TLW wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 12, 2020 4:00 am

As well as software the M1 Macs are going to need hardware drivers.

Modern class compliant hardware should work though.

I hope Ableton aren't as "secretive" about this as they are with news about new versions/features.

doghouse wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 11, 2020 6:16 pm

Seeing as how the M1 Macs just dropped yesterday and Big Sur finally drops tomorrow, I wouldn't be expecting anything until next year.

Big Sur + ARM Dev kits have been available for developers since June.

The audio software industry is probably the worst when it comes to ignoring WWDC and acting surprised when the new version drops in the autumn every year.

But Ableton haven't been too bad with this. By now they should at least be able to tell us :

• Whether Live 10 works fine in Rosetta

• If they foresee weeks or months of work to port Live to native ARM

• If this is gonna be Live 11 only.

I really hope they've started the work. They're not a one person shop, it would be inexcusable not to.

Tuur wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 12, 2020 7:25 am

TLW wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 12, 2020 4:00 am

As well as software the M1 Macs are going to need hardware drivers.

Modern class compliant hardware should work though.

One would certainly hope so.

Though there’s still lots of audio/music related hardware that does need specific drivers, including audio interfaces unless Apple have found a way to produce the same latency etc. results from class compliance that manufacturer’s drivers currently provide.

And there’s always some companies (Korg, Roland...) that insist on doing things their own way rather than being class compliant for no obvious reason other than a desire to write drivers. Though a cynic might suggest that making functions dependent on specific drivers, then cease releasing updated ones that work with the latest operating system updates is an underhand way of building “planned obsolescence” into a product.

docbot wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 12, 2020 8:22 pm

I hope Ableton aren't as "secretive" about this as they are with news about new versions/features.

The risk for software companies, especially when making things as ccomplex as DAWs or professional image/video editing software, is that there’s only one thing that annoys customers more than “secrecy”.

Which is announcing a release date in the hope the product will be ready on time, only to end up either missing the date or, worse, releasing a defective or bug-laden product. It’s possible for a productivity software company which sells a very complex product into a specialist and competitive niche market to lose an awful lot of its customer base pretty rapidly if it releases really poor quality product or, worse, takes payments for what turns out to be a product that should never have been released until at least the mission-critical bugs were thoroughly squashed.

Ableton have to at the very least deal with the Cycling 74 team and Max4Live, and AAS for Analog, Tension, Collision etc. etc. So three different companies with teams of developers have to port Suite to Apple Silicon. I wouldn't expect this to be as quick as they were porting from PPC to Intel.

I would throw out it's probably going to be mid 2021 before they're ported completely. We might get a Rosetta capable version before that, but I wouldn't count on buying an AS mac for Ableton until mid 2021 I bet.

Machinesworking wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 13, 2020 1:14 am

So three different companies with teams of developers have to port Suite to Apple Silicon.

Which is a little more complex, but wouldn't really matter if each of them separately were on top of it.

Although the codebase for Live and Max is most likely way bigger, Algoriddim already released their DJAY update (now universal with M1 support). This software also does sequencing (although simpler), video, realtime track syncing, shifting and stretching, effects and Ableton Link. On top of that they have wicked Neural Engine support for splitting tracks into separate components (e.g. a capella or drums) live. These guys are always first out of the gate.

It's really a matter of priorities.

That said, I love the work Abe is doing on L11.

Rewriting Ableton for the native M1 should be similar to rewriting it for iOS (code and function-wise). At least, this is what I've taken from the Apple Presentation. Quite a big challenge, I guess, for such a big program as Ableton. For example, Cubase has been somehow ported to iOS and works quite well, I imagine they won't have it so difficult to migrate. Also hardware drivers: there are plenty of interfaces already working well under iOS