Live 2.01 Impressions, or "ableton listens, users rejoice" Options

[filarion]

Paid my 80 Euros to upgrade to Live 2.0 a couple of days ago. Awesome new features like different timestretch engines (acoustic guitar tracks actually can be used in Live now), ability to turn those engines off for individual samples, better automatization, etc.

Performance looks to be the same like 1.5 - which means that it still isn't Altivec optimized, and faster on PCs, but the Ableton guys are Mac users themselves and are promising to add this (requiring a bunch of rewrites) for the next upgrade. Anyways, especially with software like Live the performance is nowhere near as important as creativity.

[filarion]

thanks for contrapuncting me Levon River, I almost felt bad for dissing Reason as much as I did. I did mention that you can get great results out of Reason however, I was just having a hard time balancing personal opinion and objective suggestions.

charlie, the Reason you saw on sale is most likely version 1. version 2, which was released earlier this year, has aforementioned 2nd sample CD with orchestral samples, a new synthesizer, a new sampler (the NN-XT Levon mentioned) and other new features that improve a lot on the older version. However, I think that a good deal on Reason 1 will probably be your best choice to check it out. Upgrading to v2 is probably cheap. Check www.propellerheads.se for more infos.

I'll stop commenting on the quantize-issue though. just not my way of working (took me 2 years to work myself up to almost never using quantization on the mpc)