Ableton Forum

Ok ... I am not a fanboy of any product or company. I am very new to the DAW thing, and Ableton live is the first DAW that I have ever used.

Over the past days I have read numerous posts (basically Logic 8 related posts) were it is mentioned again and again that DAWs such as logic, cubase, sonar, etc., beat Ableton Live hands down when it comes to the arrangement side of things.

What is it that these other DAWs do in arrange view that is so much better than live? How come they 'win hands down' ... and how come they are often regarded as more serious 'studio apps'????

I ask because I have no experience with any other DAW, and I am happy with Live (including its arrangement view). What is it that I am missing??

Don't miss my point, I am not blindly defending Ableton Live, or wanting to start a pointless argument about anything. I am just inexperienced, and just wondering.

Cheers!!

One really sexy thing about the new Reason4 sequencer/arranger is the multiple takes thing. Where each track have layered "takes". So you can have more than one track per track. The same could be achieved pretty easily in live I guess... but... they gave it a name... that must mean something.

FAGGOT MODE

crossfades, edit-groups......

track folders, soloing a group..

Ghost copies, the ability skip sections of an arrangement (inverse locators), track based parameters like fade in and out, destructive editing (with some apps, not Logic however).

TMost DAWs have two view - mixer view and an arrange view. Live extends the mixer view to include clips, but whats a real pain is you cant have both views open together.

On a multi-monitor setup - I would really like to have the clip/mix view open on one screen and the arrange view open on another.

Then add folder tracks so I can more easily visually group related bits and more usefully hide them (I dont really care about a bunch of midi tracks once they are bounced to audio, so I currently delete them and save a new version, but its a pain to go back and make a change then).

Group tracks - these are basically submixes - Live does sub mixes just fine, but they are part of the general tracks mess. Where live kind of fail is where you have for eg the audio tracks from a multi-micd drum kit and you want to edit all parts together - with folder support, you stick them in a folder and edit the folder except for individual track edits.

Basically Live just get really messy to work with on a project onvolving lots of tracks.

Also for audio tracking there is no convenient support for manging multiple takes, other multiple clips, but to lay them out in arrange view, you need to create a load of temporary audio track to accomodate them.


Most decent DAW are way way better at dealing with midi - editing it etc, and very usefully capturing sysex for session restore.

Live doesnt have groove templates either - just a few global shuffle variations, so if you programming drums. Something Ill often do with drum tracks because Im not a great drummer, Ill record, listen through looping block of bars until I find the one with the best groove. Then Ill extract that as a groove template (timing and dynamics) and apply that to the others to bring them into line a bit. I wont even bother trying to do the manual equivalent of that in Live - dont have enough life times...


All live has over the other is - suprise suprise - a bunch of features to support capture and live playing and mixing of your clips and connvenient fx management through racks etc - and it does tha really well. Otherwise its actually a rather primitive DAW several generation behind the others in many ways, but it gives us a workflow for composition that none of the other can offer or match for simplicity.

I do wish Ableton would either make it a *much* better DAW, or acknowledge its a rather primitive DAW and provide much better features to simplify exporting to other DAWs - cubase, logic, etc. Or both

To be fair, Live 6 did include the option to export all tracks as audio files for your last point, one of the few apps to provide this.

Other DAW's offer the ability to change time signatures in the timeline.

Live also has no time counter, only beats

Would most live users know a time sig even if it bit them in the ass?

LOL

How long it takes you to sign your DJ name on some ho's chest in a club?

now that you guys mention all that, i'm glad live is so simple to use with a very minimalistic interface and the more essential features and functions, instead of trying to do everything with complicated menus and windows and more menus, and etc... you get the idea. live is very straightforward. yay

Yea, I just tried out Logic8 in the shop. As cool as it is, with MainStage and all, it's still the same Logic.

Live's intuitive way of doing things (like discarding that crappy effects-should-look-like-inserts-in-real-mixer) is the best thing it has. It's always a pleasure to work with Live.

Still, adding the stuff mentioned in this thread wouldn't make Live more complicated or add menus. It's all about small minor things that are missing from here and there.

multi lane automation view, automatic retakes, better audio editing views.

live's arrangement view is pretty basic... session view is where it rules.

leedsquietman wrote:multi lane automation view

that's one of the only things I would really really want.