Ableton Forum

Hi all,

I am still debatting whether or not to upgrade to Live 6. I love the fact that Live 6 now has multiprocessor support as I just bought a new laptop. And also I am excited about the deep freeze function. However, one of the weaknesses in my opinion is that Live never had any good MIDI editing capabilities. Since I do a lot of my own projects using MIDI I am still switching between Cubase (now) 4, and Live (as of now 5). I would love to just drop one of them and do it all in one DAW. So, to make a long story short, has MIDI editing been improved in Live 6? $119 is a lot of money for a downloadable upgrade imho. Your comments are highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Ken

Exactly what kind of MIDI editing capabilities do you need?

Not an exact replica of Cubase but in L6 you've got midi time stretching which is nice.
In L5 trying to merge multiple midi streams to one vst instrument was greedy on resources. In live 6 it uses a much much smaller overhead.
The midi note length thing is nice too.

I used to use Cubase 2 and Logic 5.5 - now it's all Live.

Still it would be nice to have some more midi facilities - a midi delay plugin anyone?

The racks are awesome and people are starting to create interesting midi racks - v cool.



L6 feels like its had a complete overhaul and runs faster for me on a single proc machine.

Hi guys,

simple "fixed length", quantize length without have to physically drag a note. Adjust velocity without the plugin, because I want to select certain notes and add or subtract some velocity, etc. Just simple stuff would be enough. It is so tedious to adjust note lengths, velocities, etc. in Live imho.

Ken

kenporter wrote:Hi guys,

Adjust velocity without the plugin, because I want to select certain notes and add or subtract some velocity, etc.

you can do that already. Open the midi clip, hit the piano-roll for the row of midi notes you want to adjust and then alt-drag ( i think!?) on the notes to adjust velocity

Hi Ken - i was a long term (very long!) Cubase user but when I transferred to Live about 18 months ago I have never missed any of the Cubase additional MIDI facilities. For every missing ‘feature’ in Live over Cubase, I find another 5 that are in Live but not Cubase.

Clearly your length example is real but there are work arounds. For example, you can step enter note with fixed lengths – not great but hey..

But just to repeat myself, I find there is so much more I can do in Live over Cubase so when it gets down to the little missing items, these become less important because I have made my mind up based on the ‘bigger picture’. I know this does not help you but maybe thinking about it this way will make you think: Hey, I actually just prefer Cubase (or vice versa).

Good luck dude..