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]

your work sounds very interesting and I think that you'll be extremely happy with Ableton Live then. my previous suggestion was from a producer's point of view. from an artist's pov I'll heartily suggest Live, especially since you're in a dynamic environment and not only producing by yourself

I'm not really comfortable with suggesting Reason as addition, but it is the easiest way to create new sounds to use in Live without external gear - well, sampling your soundcard's input is even easier if you want to use external gear. For instance, I usually play my Waldorf Pulse basslines into Live - loops really come to life when recorded live in my opinion. extreme vocal manipulation and basic "clean" vocals work in it too.

you can also crossfade between different patterns easily in live, plus, you can put complete songs into your arrangement if you still want to go back to steve roach without interrupting the flow. :>

have you tried the Live 2 demo? there's also some free samplesets at the ableton homepage (check out the david moufang/move d. samples, the guy's a friend of mine).

.martin