All I ever want from a software upgrade is that all the stuff in the marketing goo just (fucking) works. All I ever get is disappointed. But the clouds have parted, flowers are growing and birds are singing because I’ve been using the beta of Ableton Live 4.0 (b11) for several

hours and every single new feature I tried “just (fucking) worked.” No crashes, no blips, no screeching halts. That this beta software stayed up and running for several hours is a world’s record — in fact this beta is proving to be more solid than many released music software products.

I created a quick and dirty project that exercised some of the new features (click on Vincent to hear my first take at some midi/audio recording).

I love FL Studio (Fruity Loops) for lots of reasons but recording live tracks and manipulating audio files in general is a pain and hurts my creative flow. This alone has driven me into the arms of Ableton’s Live, which by comparison makes capturing and recording audio in FL feel like cheap toy-ware.

In 4.0 Live now hosts virtual instruments and has provisions for recording MIDI tracks. In the “Test Drive” project I used the built-in “Impulse” sampler for drum programming and the “Simpler” sampler with a single one-shot bass note sample for the bass part. I used the free sfz soundfont VST player by rgc:audio for the clavinet. I recorded the guitar parts live and I threw a whole boat load of heavy duty DirectX effects using the free ffx vst/directx conversion rack all over the place including Waves mastering tools on the master track.

With only a few shots of tequila I could easily be talked into saying that the Impulse sampler is the easiest sampler I have ever used in my life. Here’s a screen shot:

To set up the drum set I simply dragged some one shots into various slots. Each slot is automatically mapped into the MIDI keyboard starting at C#3 and each slot has its own panel of basic sound manipulation parameters. Each slot is also on it’s own output channel so you can route any instrument to it’s own individual audio track. Which leads us to…

Break from the Fawning

I could just as easily (without liquid prying) commit to saying the new audio and MIDI routing system is one of the more convoluted tangles I’ve run across. Yes, extremely flexible virtual cabling are now possible, but things get crazy very quickly and it will take me a little bit of time to figure out all the virtual wiring capabilities:

One of the bigger disappointments with 4.0 is that my system was taxed pretty hard by just playing around with this stuff (six audio tracks with three samplers and a few plug-ins) and if Live does become by main working surface I will (at least) need to upgrade memory, if not the whole system. The problem was not audio glitches (which Live does a good job at keeping at high priority) but UI glitches and latency were visible and distracting.

And I know this vague, and I’m very sorry about that but to my ears my projects in Fruity Loops just sound better than Live (or Acid for that matter) and that hasn’t changed in Live 4 beta. This topic of Live’s lack of ‘brightness’ often comes up in forums and causes great strife amongst die-hard fans and the rest of us with lots of (understandable) defensive posturing on one side and inarticulate shrugging on the other. I wish I had the vocabulary to explain it and concrete, technical “proof” but I don’t and I continue to chalk it up to my lack of understanding of Live and it’s proper usage — although that just tells me that something about Fruity is more forgiving to the way I work because I just never had to deal with this. I’ll just say it again: the music I make with Live is not as ‘crisp’ or ‘bright’ as with Fruity.

At least on the surface Live 4.0 obviates the need to ReWire FL or Reason in as a client for most cases but I suspect there is plenty of idiosyncratic functionality in FL and Reason that fans just can’t let go of (Fruity Slicer and Wave Traveller come to mind). The bottom line is that while more things are possible and easy in Live, it’s still seems like less fun than building up masses of MIDI based drum patterns in FL and synth-arpeggio-techno-cascade-and-sweep in Reason.

(I’m told the ACID team is kicking ass on 5.0, we’ll see what these guys are up for now, ACID Pro does seem to be fading further and further back into the distance with this release of Live.)

Probably the worst thing I can say about Live is that it is still one of the most expensive hosts out there. The upgrade price is just a plain old fashioned gouge — the price of the upgrade from Live 3.0 to 4.0 is more than the entire cost of FL Studio which include life-time free upgrades.

Worth the Upgrade

Despite what I point out above, it does seem like the upgrade is definitely worth it and I will no doubt jump in. Adding MIDI and flexible audio routing can be very overwhelming to a host, in my opinion Cakewalk, ACID and FL Studio are all examples of perfectly good specialized tools that broken themselves on their way to the all-in-one-host nirvana. Live does a much better job than those guys remembering the most important part of all: stability.