Product Description

Ableton Live 7 is your companion during every stage of the musical process, from creation to production to performance. Live offers two main views that interact in a powerful and unique way, allowing you to create, produce and perform your music all in a single application. The unique Session View acts as a powerful musical sketch and launch pad, allowing you to try out new ideas easily and improvise freely, The Arrangement View offers a timeline-based approach for traditional multitrack recording, MIDI sequencing and other music production tasks. You can even improvise in the Session View, and all of your actions will be recorded into the Arrangement View, where they can be edited whenever you like. Other features include:
Built-in software instruments - Simpler for creative sample-based synthesis, Impulse for sampled drums Instrument-, Drum-, Effect Racks for creating and managing complex performance setups, drum kits and multi-effects VST and AU effects and instruments support; automatic plug-in delay compensation REX file support and native sliced audio file creation Video import and export for scoring to picture or warping picture to music Real-time control of parameters with any MIDI controller just MIDI-map it or choose from a list of popular supported controllers for instant mapping Full ReWire support Single-screen user interface for simple, creativity-focused operation Multicore and multiprocessor support

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58994 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Ableton
• Platforms: Windows XP Professional, Mac OS X
• Format: DVD-ROM

Features

• Multitrack recording up to 32-bit/192kHz
• Complete nondestructive editing with unlimited undo
• Powerful and creative MIDI sequencing of software and hardware instruments
• Real-time time-stretching and warping of AIFF, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and MP3 files, for improvisation and instant remixing
• A comprehensive selection of built-in audio effects, including a host of creative delays, filters, distortions, studio compressors and EQs

Customer Reviews

Best software I've ever used
I'll apologize in advance for the very lengthy review, but I want to cover all the points that made this program worth the rather hefty cost for me, an amateur music producer.

Music production is only a hobby for me, but as a professional programmer with 22 years experience I feel confident in saying this is one of the most useful, stable pieces of software ever written. Even the Windows version has an Apple Mac-like ease of use, with all the menus and controls logically laid out in a "show me just what I need but make it easy to dig deeper if I wanna" manner.

The different time stretching modes have handled loops from my library that have choked demos of competing products. Ditto for the handling of my favorite soft synths (Cakewalk Rapture and Z3ta) and some legacy MIDI hardware that brought Acid Pro to its knees. My favorite feature is the ability to place what Ableton calls "devices" -- tools like reverb, parametric EQ, panning -- into "chains" that can be saved and recalled and applied to future projects. I've built several "Trance effect" chains for my fave style of music and it saves me hours of trying to recreate a sound I liked earlier.

In the age of shoddy Microsoft operating systems, it's a sad fact that a major feature in any product is that it doesn't constantly lock up the software or the entire computer, but so be it. I've owned Ableton Live for 6 months now and I use it extensively -- it has crashed only 2 times in that time period.

Weak points: Ableton advertises the single-window interface as a feature, but that is a hugely flawed interpretation. Anyone using dual monitors will be staring at one empty screen when running Live. An example of why this is so bad can be seen with the new Spectrum Analyzer device. To make the SA display large enough to be useful, the user is forced to click a mulitude of "resizing arrows" which shrinks other parts of the interface to a size that makes them unreadable. Anyone used to placing their spectrum analyzer on a 2nd monitor while monitoring is "S. O. L."

Fortunately, you CAN toggle an option to allow 3rd party plugins to be placed on a second monitor. I had to drop another $90 for a quality analyzer plugin, but at least I can place it on another monitor where it's large enough to be useful. Truthfully, my Nu-Gen Audio "Visualyzer" plugin leaves every other analyzer I've used in the dust so the Live limitation doesn't hurt me too badly.

The only other annoyance is "screen clutter" when your project has more than a dozen or so tracks. The only solution is to deal with it and scroll constantly back and forth looking for a particular track. Sony Acid Pro blows Live out of the water on this one, allowing users to create folders where they can tuck away groups of tracks such as Percussion, Backing Synths, Leads, etc.

Again my apologies for such a long review. These are things I wanted to know before I decided to drop nearly $500 on a professional DAW package. Hopefully it can help another shopper in the same boat as I was.

Amazing piece of software...
I use Live for pretty much all my mixes now. I purchased the software during version 4 but was still using my master sequencer, Digital Performer, mostly. The more I got to know Live, the more I used it. I create electronic music as well as a more traditional rock style, with guitars, drums, vocals, etc. I have continued to purchase upgrades since then, and now I'm on to version 7. I have not continued to purchase upgrades on my other software. Ableton Live is now my sequencer of choice. Improved audio fidelity, drum racks, better compression with side-chaining, a great browser and not to forget it's premium time stretching & looping capabilites--all of these things make Ableton Live not just another tool in the toolbox...it is the toolbox!

Very nice software and shipping was fast
I've been using Ableton for about 4 years now...

Its definelly my first choice for a sequencing software!