Ableton Live

Robert Henke, electronic visual music artist, software developer and co-founder of Ableton discusses the artist/engineer overlap and how software needs to be accessible to encourage and not hinder the creative process.

Ableton’s first app puts a Live‑compatible ideas machine in the palm of your hand.

Live 11 introduces new features, improves some old ones, and throws in some exciting new rack devices for good measure.

With Live 10, Ableton’s aim is to make the music‑making process as smooth as possible. Have they succeeded?

Ableton have released major new versions of their two flagship products, Live and Push. Live 9.5 is free to owners of Live 9. Meanwhile, and more importantly, there is a new Push controller. 

Live 9 has been a long time coming, but, along with Ableton’s new Push controller, has the potential to revolutionise music-making.

The challenge was to add yet more features to Live without compromising its legendary ease of use. Have Ableton succeeded?

Ableton's Live revolutionised user interface design in music software, and with every update, the company have striven to retain its ergonomic appeal whilst adding some very sophisticated new features.

Ableton Live is one of the software success stories of the last few years, with devoted users in fields as diverse as DJing, remixing, theatre sound and music production. Version 5 addresses requests from all these areas, whilst retaining the program's renowned ease of use.

As a creative, stable and above all fun way of combining audio loops in real time, Ableton's Live has proved an ideal counterpart to Rewire-compatible applications such as Cubase. With version 4 offering a wealth of new features, including MIDI sequencing, could Live now replace traditional sequencers altogether?

Ableton's Live allows the user to create and record musical performances by combining sampled loops in real time, with high‑quality pitch‑shifting, time‑stretching and audio effects.