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.

[Levon River]

Seems to me that I will wind up getting
Live 2; Reason 2; either a Radium or a Edirol PCR-50; and maybe Band in a Box as well.

That will enable you to do a hell of a lot, but I do want to give you a couple of caveats:

1. If and when you do decide to add a more full-featured sequencer than Reason's, one possible bright spot on the horizon, especially for home/project studios, is Metro for OS X, which is already shipping as an upgrade to registered users of the OS 9.x versions. From their sketchy web site information it looks like that upgrade period will be over sometime in January and hopefully the program will be officially released to the public then. It seems to promise a lot of the power of the giants looming over it, at least under OS X, and it traditionally--in 9.x--had a lower price point. When Metro was a MIDI-only sequencing program, it was excellent at what it did--though it did take a different approach to some things than other similar programs. (I'm not saying it was worse or inadequate at all, just different.) Anyway, I'd keep an eye on it if I were you as a possible, because it also supports 64 tracks of audio now (with advertised support for audio units, VST, etc. under OS X) in addition to its very flexible and powerful MIDI sequencing/editing capabilities...

2. BIAB "works" as a Classic application under OS X--sort of. It has *severe* timing issues in playback, though, with QuickTime 5.x or greater if you're running it from OS X. Their brilliant "solutions": either boot into OS 9.x to use it, or DOWNGRADE to QuickTime 4.x. (Riiiiiiiiiiighhhhhht.) Hopefully they'll get around to fixing this, but they have always been so PeeCee oriented that you never know when they're going to get back around to dusting off whatever Mac they use for development. You can plan yourself some sessions, though, boot into 9.x, run it and create a little batch of .mid files, then go back into OS X and munge them there. If you do decide to get it, I highly recommend that you look over their add-on packages of "styles" and "soloists," find a few that seem to have the kinds of music that you would use most, and get those to augment the ones that come standard with the program. (Yeah, they, too, sell razors in order to sell razor blades. Who doesn't?) Also, while the developers bray on and on about how easy it is, the program is about as intuitive to manage as bra hooks in the back seat on a cold and moonless night: you might end up needing a little help.