Ableton Forum

Hi,

Bit of an old-school Live fanboy here but must nevertheless confess to not being in the loop for (many) years now. I've not been unfaithful to the Ableton Live peeps though, absolutely not, rather life just got in the way that's all.

So Live is still the only desktop DAW that clicks with me, a lot of which has to do with the fact that I've always appreciated the design skill that went into the interface (it was always clean, uncluttered, logical and direct).

Until now that is, because today I came across the "New Look" for Live and the very first thing that went through my mind was "Please, for the love of god, PLEASE let there be a way to go back to the original design!" The second thing that went through my mind was "My god, what if we can't?".

So my first question then, can we?

I much prefer the original design because the individual areas and sub-sreas of the interface felt clearly defined due to sensible use of rounded corners etc. In comparison, the "New Look" comes across looking like a chaotic mass of mess on the screen.

If this is not possible, my second question then is whether it would be possible to have Live 12.0 added to my account instead of 12.1 if I were to purchase?

Emergency over, well, for at least another two decades anyway because I'm still on Version 5 at the moment but just followed a link from another post on here which led me to a 'Download Archive' and thankfully versions prior to the "New Look" are available on there.

Phew, what a relief!

Old as it is, I'd still be using Version 5 if it were not for needing to use a bunch of 64-Bit VST stuff I'm wanting to use. I'm not tight or anything, on the contrary, but I've never seen anything come to Live that was enough to make me want to upgrade from Version 5 (other than 64-Bit which even one as determined as I can no longer put off at this point).

And just a note here to the peeps at Ableton in case they read this:

I personally believe you stand a very strong chance of alienating quite a lot of loyal, long-standing customers by doing what you just did to the interface, and I can think of much better things to spend development time and funds on. Things such as the 'Chord Track' and 'Chord Pad' functionality found in Cubase for example, which frankly leaves Live looking extremely stark and uninspiring in comparison.

Surely the whole point of a DAW is to bring everything together in order to create music. Live has the sound design avenues covered, sure, but when it comes to using it as an inspirational composition tool, it falls flat on its face in comparison to Cubase, so why not concentrate on fixng something that actually needs fixing?

Please consider this carefully since composition is the be all and end all of any piece of music. So what I'm saying is (and I'm trying my very best to be as polite as possible here), please direct development funds to where the program is severely lacking (compositional tools), and please leave well enough alone, there was nothing wrong with the original interface design, it was pretty much perfection and no doubt a major reason for Live having such an large and enthusiastic following in the first place!

Agree so much. The closest you can get to the original design is Live 11, which is where I'm at for the time being despite having bought 12 in pre-sale. Will see how development goes, if they return some of the buttons that are missing now and just polish it enough to keep stable.

Well I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so! I was just watching more videos and I think the problem is the main background divider colour doesn't contrast enough from the rest of it. I can still see the features that I like of the original design, but it looks too washed out, way too flat.

If I recall in Live 5 (which I haven't used for a while either) you could alter the theme and select from a series of preset colour tones, but you could never adjust the contrasting effect. So I'm wondering if it's possible to do that nowadays with the new look. If it's possible then I suppose it would be easy enough to fix these dark and dingy low-contrast colour schemes. Perfection of course would be if we could choose the exact colour we wanted for each interface element, that would be perfect!

Anyway, I just remembered I have an unused licence of Live Lite that came with a recent hardware purchase, and it appears that even the Lite version of Live is 64-Bit now. so that's cool, I'll just register that and hopefully that'll last me another two decades!

If we can set individual colour elements in 12.1 that would fix it for me, but if not I still might be happy as long as we can somehow adjust the contrast of the background divider colour against the rest of it. I'll get it downloaded tomorrow and find out either way I suppose.

Get Ableton Live themes here -> https://www.livethemes.co

Hmmm,

I've used every version since Live 4, and I love the changes that have gradually accumulated. Following the learning curve, I find Live to be the DAW with the most compositional possibility for me. Whenever I have ever poked into another DAW, such as Cubase as mentioned above, I feel lost in those user interfaces.

As with virtually any complex tool or system of tools in life, one must practice and keep up with things or there might be a sense of great distance from "original design" and "loss" of something.

Check this screenshot of my Live 12.1, no downloaded themes:

@102455
Thanks for that link, excellent, I'll be making good use of it as well

@nednerb
Can't speak for 12.1 in all honestly since I've never donwloaded it, but I have downloaded 12.0 from the Archive and thankfully it looks ok especially after some tweaking. Can't quite get the background border as dark as I want no matter what I do with the built-in controls, but that theme site 102455 just pointed out will allow me to see fix that!

No way do I prefer the Cubase interface to Live, you have got to be joking

Nah, I was just referring to how far behind Live is compared to Cubase in the compositional tool department. They might use basic terms such as "Chord Track" and and "Chord Pads", but man I'm telling you now, those features are extremely sophisitcated and make song writing an absolute pleasure!

It's become quite a concern though, when time and time again Ableton appear to be lost for ideas for new features that will massively improve the program, yet the biggest and most important thing of all is pretty much non-existent in Live!

Trust me, I'm a Live fanboy through and through and I sincerely do have the deepest respect for the designers, but I think they need to get their act together. I reckon the "Chord Track" and "Chord Pad" functionality of Cubase is Steinberg's secret weapon, it's what keeps people attached to Cubase which is no doubt why they include it in even the most basic version of all.

Naturally, if Ableton were to do such a thing then we can expect it to be even more slickly integrated into Live than it is in Cubase, but that's my point, we don't have such a system and while I hope I am wrong, Ableton will likely come along with Live 13 and yet again spend development time and cost on things that are already more than capable, while at the same time, ignoring the elephant in the room, that being complete ignorance of the fact that a DAW is designed to bring everything together and should therefore also cater to the composer.

It's an absolute no-brainer when you think about it, yet here we are at Live 12 and still there's nothing in Live comes close to Cubase in that area, I mean literally, nothing at all.

I mean, can you imagine if Ableton were to actually apply their design know-how and release a system equivalent or better than the one in Cubase? I honestly think it would bring-in more users and sell more upgrades of Live than ever before. This stuff is a big deal, and while I've not considered how they would implement such a thing into a design like Live, there's always a way and let's face it, design is something the Ableton peeps are very good at!

:try the Chord then the Scale MIDI effect and turn on the fairly new addition of Scale Key mode for both effects and play in the key of your song emoji :

It's a start at least..