Live.

[solipsistnation]

Holy crap. I just spent something like two hours lost in the Ableton Live 4 demo. I went through the tutorial, and then started just kinda messing around, and, man. What a great piece of software. Electronic music got fun again all of a sudden. It's like the best days of Many Small Functions except on my laptop and without having to mess around with MIDI and DIN sync and all that stuff. Wow.

Comments

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

I, uh, got bored of the Reason beta and decided I would rather have my 2.5 back, so I could do things like load and save things I've been working on. The new Reason things are neat, though. I'll probably upgrade when it becomes available, but as of today, Live 4 has become a higher priority. (Plus I can get it for much cheaper than list price since I have a cut-down version that came with my M-Audio Firewire Audiophile box and Ableton offers good demo-to-full-version upgrade pricing.)

Go through the tutorial in the demo and check it out. It's very cool.

I haven't seen BFD, but I read about it-- is it cool beyond just being a ridiculously huge set of sampled drums? The groove stuff sounds neat.

For my own drums, I've been using either my vast collection of sampled drums and drum machines from various places on the internet, collections of loops, or the Attack VST drum synth thing, which is pretty hefty and can do some very neat things. I think I probably don't know enough about real drum recording to be able to get much out of BFD. 8) (Or maybe that means it's ideal? I dunno.)

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Oh, the demo of Live that came with your Audiophile will, if you dig it, let you upgrade for significantly less than the new price...

And try downloading the 4.1 demo rather than using "Live Delta," if that's what yours came with (mine did). It's significantly better in almost every way...

[brelson.livejournal.com]

Ableton Live 4 really is stunning. I bought it upon release and am *still* finding new features that end up sucking me in for hours on end. My four-word review of Ableton 4 is this: "Who needs Cubase anymore?"

Two weeks ago I played out live with it for the first time, and the main problem was that it's so feature-heavy that I felt quite shy and nervous; ended up doing a fairly "Ableton 3"-style set, which came nowhere near making the most out of the program. Next time, though... next time!!

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can see how you would. Just with the demo version I kept coming up with stuff I wanted to save, but couldn't, alas!!!!