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]

wow, at $199 Reason 2's definitely worth every cent. I'm almost tempted get my own copy - re-drum rewired to Live is a very funky combination.

as comparison, I just looked at purchasing the new Spectrasonic's virtual instruments (Atmosphere and Stylus) for one or two seats at our University's media lab but at 400 respectively 300 bucks this is definitely too much for a simple AU/VSTi, Spectrasonics-quality samples or not.

I'd love to advise on either of those midi keyboards, but I really don't know them. At first glance I like the Edirol better though.

(5 minutes later)

wow, is the PCR-30 identical to the PCR-50 apart from the number of keys? sounds like something I might pick up soon. sweet features. any opinions on Edirol in general? Never owned any of their gear.