Product Review - Ableton Live 9 & Push

Live 9 also marks a gradual shift by Ableton towards embracing libraries developed by third-party sound designers. Many of these now feature directly on Ableton’s web site, alongside Ableton’s own sound packs, as either free or paid downloadable products; Ableton are taking on something of a curatorial role in presenting this material.

Like earlier Live versions, Live 9 ships in multiple editions, depending on your requirements and budget. Live 9 Intro is the cut-down, two-channel-only, entry-level version, while Live 9 Standard and Live 9 Suite are the full application, differing only in terms of the instruments, effects and content packs included. Max for Live, the package that extends Live with Cycling ’74’s Max audio and video toolkit, has been updated to use Max version 6, and is now an integral part of Live Suite. (In Live 8, Max for Live was always an additional, pay-to-use product, even for owners of Suite.) Finally, Live 9 now ships in 32- and 64-bit versions.

First off, the Browser has been completely overhauled, and works differently. The changes here are significant and we’ll look at them in some detail in a moment. Some of Live’s core audio effects have been enhanced, and there’s a new analogue-style compressor. There’s a lot of new content (instruments, sample sets), with more available directly from Ableton’s web site. There’s an audio-to-MIDI feature for analysing recordings and rendering them in note-sequence form. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, editing and control have been improved. MIDI editing is more powerful, and the automation machinery has been upgraded, allowing — at last — individual clips to carry their own automation data, which can be transferred between Session and Arrangement.

Live Sets and Projects are organised in pretty much the same way in Live 9 as in Live 8. The way in which the files comprising a Live Set are handled on disk is unchanged, as long as the Project is self-contained. Library and Live Pack management, however, is somewhat different.

Aside from the reinvented Browser, the only other obvious change is in the Control Bar. The transport controls have a few new buttons next to them, partly reflecting changes in the way automation is managed, and partly, as we’ll see, the way the Push controller works.

Live 9’s Browser represents a rethink of the way Live’s resources — and yours — are presented. The View selection buttons are gone, and there are now two panes side-by-side. The right-hand ‘content’ pane contains a familiar-looking tree of items, but the left-hand pane is new and holds two sets of items, labelled Categories and Places. Categories partly replaces the three kinds of Browser pane in Live 8. You can browse Live’s devices (audio effects, MIDI effects and instruments) or VST and AU plug-ins. Max for Live’s devices now have their own Category, whereas Live 8’s Browser presented them just like its other devices.

As in Live 8, presets and rack presets for Live’s devices are further arranged in sound categories such as Pad, Bass, Piano & Keys, and so on. It’s not clear where these labels come from — I assume they’re hard-wired into Live’s Library — and it doesn’t seem possible to label one’s own presets. While Live’s own instruments, and many in third-party packs, seem to be categorised, the MIDI effects aren’t, and the audio effects aren’t except for the effect racks. Nothing in Max for Live is categorised, and your own presets will end up with the label ‘Others’, which isn’t terribly informative. Personally, though, I don’t make a lot of use of sound categories, and Live 9 does at least categorise the core library and Live Pack content, which is most important.

The Places area of the sidebar replaces the drop-down menu of folders in Live 8. Three of the Places entries are hard-wired: Packs is for for library packs, User Library is for your own generated content and presets, and Current Project is pretty self-explanatory. Below these items, you can add arbitrary folders: particular Live Projects, external disks, sample DVDs and so on. These folders don’t have to be permanently available, as Live 9 is smart enough to ignore disks that aren’t currently mounted when it launches. Cleverly, Live will notice if a disk is mounted during a session, and will even allow disks to be unmounted again, assuming that the Live Set isn’t using any samples on the disk at the time. When browsing, you can start from a Category, or from a Place: they’re mutually exclusive.

The content pane is multi-column: the tree view is in a column called Name, while a second column can display Place, Date Modified, Size, Type (device, preset, clip, sample format, and so on) or Rank. The Rank column shows a small histogram which presumably indicates how popular, or well-used, an item is, but it wasn’t clear to me how this worked. The contents of the Place column depend very much on how you organise folders in the Places list. I initially added a single folder called ‘Sequences’ containing all of my Live Projects, only to have the Place column dutifully report ‘Sequences’ for all of my presets and sample files, with no indication of which Project or Set they were in. Adding individual Projects to Places would be more sensible, but I feel that the Browser needs to provide a few more hints — down in Live’s Status Bar, perhaps — to indicate where particular items are inside Projects.

Rather disappointingly, the Browser can only show two columns at once, one of which is always Name. Live 8 allowed multiple columns, so this seems to be a step backwards. However, searching has been improved dramatically in Live 9. Again, it’s worth a quick look at how things worked in Live 8: any of the three folder views could be put into ‘search mode’ by entering a search term, and would then do a search in the background, which could take several seconds, or even minutes. Live 9’s search is more immediate, and operates more as a filter on the Categories and Places in the sidebar. Start typing into the search area at the top of the Browser, and the content pane immediately changes to just show items matching the search. The highlight colour in the sidebar also changes to show that a search filter is active. Searching — or, if you prefer, filtering — is fast: when a folder is added to Places, Live indexes it immediately rather than waiting until search time. Search will find things by file name (samples, Live Sets, exported clip files and so on) and also by sound category, and you can also search by device name. A search for ‘Operator’ (Live’s FM synth) found me a bunch of Operator presets as well as entire device racks which just happened to contain an Operator instance, which is clever. You can even search for VST and AU plug-ins by name, if you happen to own too many to keep track of, but alas, there’s still no searching within Live Sets for track names, clips within tracks, or devices. Clips and device presets are only seen if exported.

Finally, the preview area at the bottom of the Browser has learned a new trick. While Live 8 could preview samples and clips (including MIDI clips, by means of loading devices and plug-ins on demand), Live 9 can preview instruments directly. However, this feature is restricted to presets in the Live Library or Live Packs — presumably the MIDI ‘demo’ sequence for the preview is bundled specially — so the function is lost for user-created presets or old libraries.

Live 9 completely splits the Core Live Library, the third-party Live Packs, and user-generated content. The Core Library itself is presented as a Live Pack called ‘Core Library’, while Max for Live content is in the pack ‘Core Max for Live’. User-generated content goes into User Library, so the Core Library and Live Packs aren’t altered when you create and file your own material.

A few reasons present themselves. Firstly, you sometimes want to take material in a partially mixed-down form from the Arrangement and put it back into the Session, perhaps for live performance, or for freeing up the song structure to try out new ideas. While Live 8 allowed you to copy and paste clips freely between the two Views, automation data lived purely in the Arrangement, and any automation associated with clips in the Arrangement would be discarded if they were copied back into the Session. Secondly, in the intricate world of electronic sound design, the way in which instruments and effects are controlled can be as important as the MIDI notes or audio that goes into them, and that control information can be part and parcel of every section of a song, right down to individual clips, so it makes sense to allow automation at this level. Thirdly, it’s now possible to create and apply small chunks of automation in the Session for performance. If you want to fade up a track under direct automation control in the Session, you can now do so. Lastly, automation data in the Session can be recorded and edited using Push. I suspect that the requirement for Push to work with automation was part of the motivation behind Session support.