In less than a decade, Ableton Live has gone from being an innovative, yet fringe, looping application to—with apologies to a certain beverage—the choice of a new generation of music makers. Somewhere in between, Live matured from a specialty program to not only a full-fledged DAW, but also the DAW to beat, with the other industry giants scrambling to incorporate features that endeared Live to producers and live performers of electronic and hip-hop music. All the while, Ableton strove to maintain the basis of Live's ethos—user friendliness, stability, and a workflow that supported spontaneous creativity.

After a breakneck pace of a major update almost every year, Live 8 met some user resistance last year due to bugginess. To stay true to its stance on stability, Ableton announced a temporary suspension of new feature development in 2010, in order to focus on bug fixes—a rare move for any software developer.

Despite keeping its one-window simplicity, Live 8 had reached a Photoshop-like level of complexity. Because more people use Live for live performance than any other DAW, stability must remain a priority. Since the announced hiatus, two free updates to Live 8 have been released, bringing it to version 8.1.3 at the time of this writing. Allow me to take Ableton's new-feature hiatus as an opportunity to revisit Live 8.

Foundation of Innovation
Live began with elastic audio as its cornerstone, a now commonplace ability to treat audio as if it were MIDI information, with real-time compression and expansion of audio length being independent of pitch. Live has remained a real-time composition tool where you can record, edit, and arrange audio on the fly without ever stopping the music. Its breakthrough interface combines the Arrangement View (see Fig. 1)—the standard DAW system of linear audio and MIDI tracks—with the Session View (see Fig. 2), where tracks comprise a series of audio or MIDI clip slots that can be launched independently at any time, as well as clip Scenes that launch an entire row of clips at once. Material can be shuttled to and from the Session and Arrange views, and it is the dynamic between the live performance/live composition of the Session view and the more traditional Arrange view that has helped break down the barriers between production and remixing, and between DJing and live performance.

Fig1: The Arrangement View presents linearly recorded audio and MIDI tracks.

Live's "warping" of audio based on the transients allows the program to conform a clip to your session tempo, and provides the basis for an array of audio slicing, processing, and re-arranging features Ableton has added. The warping of entire songs, along with the Session view and the crossfader, have made Live a hit with laptop DJs as well. To capitalize on that Ableton and Serato [http://serato.com/] have partnered for The Bridge, an add-on product that's coming soon and will give you turntable-like control over a Live Set in Serato Scratch Live or Serato Itch.

Fig2: In the Session View, tracks hold columns of individually launchable clip slots for audio or MIDI clips, and scenes to the right launch entire rows of clips at once.

In addition to the Session and Arrange views that you can toggle between, Live's single-window interface holds all the other workspaces, which you can collapse and/or resize. A browser on the left accesses the computer file system, with shortcuts to your plug-ins and the Ableton Library's instruments, effects, and audio content. A track/clip view along the bottom shows any instruments or effects on a track or the audio/MIDI editing features for a selected clip. Instrument and effect chains can be saved as recallable Instrument Racks and put into the Library for future use and include Macro controls that can be named and assigned to multiple destinations within the Rack.

Drum Racks combine the Racks concept with drum-machine-style trigger pads for all 128 MIDI notes (see Fig. 3). You can drag software instruments, Instrument Racks, or even other Drum Racks onto any of the Drum Rack pads. Each Drum Rack has up to six send effects and its own submixer, making a Drum Rack-filled Live Set resemble an MC Escher-like work of art.

Fig3: A Drum Rack starts with up to 128 drum pads, each with ability to hold an instrument and effect chain, and adds Macro controls, send effects, and a sub mixer.

Warp and Groove
Live 8 specifically introduced many new features, including an update of the Warping Engine that's at the heart of the program's audio manipulation. Its improved analysis identifies transients within the audio file, and places a "pseudo" Warp Marker over the transients that you mouse over. You double-click or drag them to create real Warp Markers, which stay fixed to specific points within the sample as you drag the markers along a fixed timeline to stretch the sample. You can also now quantize audio clips.

A new groove engine allows you to apply and then modify a variety of timing behaviors onto a MIDI or audio clip, similar in result to Propellerhead Reason's ReGroove Mixer, but different in operation. A Grooves folder in the Ableton Library holds a couple hundred preset groove files that you can drag onto a clip to apply the feel. Selections include dozens of swing grooves that mimic famous hardware beat-machines, including the E-mu SP1200 and Akai MPC series.

Applied grooves in a Live Set show up in the Groove Pool (see Fig. 4), a collapsible pane in the Live window. From the Groove Pool, you can tweak the Quantize, Timing, Velocity, and other groove settings and save changes as new presets. You can also create new groove files by extracting them from existing audio clips, for instance to "borrow" the groove from one of your favorite artist's beats and apply it to your own.

Fig4: The Groove Pool holds Groove files from the Library. You can drag a Groove to a clip to apply its timing behaviors to the clip, or drag a clip into the Groove Pool to "extract" its Groove and save it to the Library.

There are many workflow enhancements to Live 8, including creating crossfades with adjustable slopes between adjacent tracks in the Arrangement view and adding automatic 4 ms de-clicking fades at individual clip edges. And MIDI editing now more resembles audio editing in the Arrangement view. There are additional keyboard shortcuts for MIDI editing, and MIDI step-recording is also possible.

A new feature that was overdue in Live is track grouping. You can combine audio and MIDI tracks into a Group Track by highlighting multiple tracks and pressing Command-G on the Mac (Control-G in Windows) or using the contextual menu. Group Tracks have mixer controls and can host effects that apply to every individual track in the group. You can then fold or unfold the Group Tracks to simplify the look of the session. When multiple tracks are selected, any changes you make to parameters—track on/off, solo, record arm, volume, pan, send levels—affect all the selected tracks, even when they're not grouped. If the values between the tracks are different to begin with, that difference is maintained as you make adjusts.

The Browser now has a Preview Tab that lets you audition audio, complete with a scrubable waveform display and a Raw button for previewing it without it being warped to the session tempo.

Moving on to aesthetics, color coding is now possible for tracks, clip scenes, Macro controls, and Rack chains. And in the Look/Feel Preferences tab, you can now zoom Live’s display out to 50 percent of normal size or in to as much as 200 percent. In either direction, the details remain sharp and clear, apart from just a touch of blurriness in some details toward the 200 percent limit.

Instruments and Effects
Ableton added or improved many Devices (instruments and effects) with this iteration. The version of Live 8 you buy determines which devices you'll have access to.

The Live 8 download ($449) includes all the effects and the Simpler sample-playback instrument, while the Live 8 box ($549) adds the multi-GB Essential Instruments Collection 2 (EIC2), comprising sampled orchestral instruments, guitars, keyboards, and drums.

The Ableton Suite 8 download ($699) includes everything from the Live 8 download, the Drum Machines and Latin Percussion Drum Racks collections, and all of Ableton's software instruments—Simpler, Sampler, Operator, Collision, Electric, Analog, and Tension.

Finally, the Ableton Suite 8 box ($849) includes all the aforementioned devices and sampled content, plus the exclusive Session Drums collection of multisampled acoustic drums.

For Suite 8, Ableton retooled its FM soft synth, Operator, with a waveform editor that lets you draw your own waveforms to be used in synth patches or to export and open as sample files in Live's Simpler or Sampler instruments. Operator also has a new MIDI modulation section, new filter types (14 total), adjustable slope envelopes, and oscillator feedback.

Also, the new Collision instrument physically models mallet percussion sounds, and its accompanying Corpus effect lets you process audio with Collision's resonator section.

Continuing the tradition of Ableton's blatantly obvious nomenclature, the new Looper device takes the cue from classic real-time looping hardware, letting you loop-record endless overdubs of audio, with controls that are optimized for a MIDI foot pedal (see Fig. 5). Looper will sync to your Live Set, or if you record to Looper before playing the Set, the Set syncs to Looper's audio. You can import audio into Looper to start with and export the finished product to a track or the Live Browser.

Fig5: Live 8's new Looper records endlessly overdubbed loops that can be exported to a track.

More hardware inspiration is afoot with the new Overdrive effect, a saturation/distortion tool based on guitar stomp box circuits. It applies anything from subtle warmth to blistering distortion.

The great-sounding Vocoder provides immediate visual feedback of the 20 filter bands and flexible options for the carrier source (see Fig. 6). The new Limiter effect works very well on the Master channel or wherever else you want to restrict the output to a certain threshold. It includes input-gain and release-time controls.

Fig6: The new 20-band Vocoder can use external audio, noise, an internal oscillator, or the host track (modulator) as the carrier signal.

Another important piece in the complete DAW puzzle comes in the form of the Multiband Dynamics tool (see Fig. 7). Each of its three independent frequency bands have upper and lower thresholds, envelope controls, and adjustable crossover points. You can perform upward and downward compression and expansion on the three bands for sound-shaping and mastering purposes.

Fig7: Three independent, adjustable frequency bands provide compression and expansion in the new Multiband Dynamics Device.

The simple, yet powerful, Frequency Shifter includes Shift and Ring Mod modes, plus an LFO section with six waveshapes, giving you access to a delightful range of other-worldly motion effects. The Flanger now has an optional Hi-Quality mode, and third-party plug-ins get a new Configure Mode that lifts the former restriction on editing only the first 128 plug-in parameters.

Towards the Future
Live 8 comfortably qualifies as a full-fledged DAW and offers many things other DAWs don't, such as the clip-oriented Session view and the Drum Racks. As far as the sheer number of features, it still doesn't measure up to the DAW dinosaurs. But while other DAWs may tout live performance as an afterthought, for Live, stage performance is its hallmark.

Ableton has innovated so much in the past, perhaps it is time to innovate again. Packaging every copy of Live with a rock-solid version for the stage along with a more feature-adventurous version for the studio—with session cross-compatibility between versions—could perhaps be the next step forward.

In my experience with Live 8, crashes have been few and far between, and version 8.1.3 appears to offer greater stability than ever. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Live 8 to new users.

Pros: Unparalleled merging of live performance features with a full-featured recording environment for the studio. New groove engine, looper, and effects devices add to the overall value.
Cons: Costs more than competitors. Some as-yet unresolved bug issues in version 8.1.3.

Markkus Rovito is a musician, DJ and journalist in San Francisco. He contributes regularly to DJTechTools.com and SonicScoop.com and plays drums for Tomihira.