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Re: Great round-up article comparing DAWs



Automation is one of the biggest problems in Live. Compared to other DAWs it is indeed extremely primitive. From what I've read on their forum and elsewhere, Ableton are limited in making improvements to automation by previous code decisions. In other words, they made decisions years ago that limit what they can do now and they'd have to rewrite whole chunks of the program in order to address that. They can't add bezier curves, for instance, without rewriting loads of code.

On that basis it's perfectly possible that the behaviour of automation when stretching midi is not, in fact, a 'bug' as such but is how it was originally meant to act, however unhelpful and undesirable that may be. Of course if it's not a bug then you can still say that it's bad design and poor planning but that's a slightly different criticism.

Given that it's been several years since Live 8 came out it may be that they've taken the time to go back and rewrite the code that needed rewriting to introduce some more sought after and up to date features. If they say that the midi stretching thing is not a bug then you can always request that they change it as a new feature.

And while it's true that Live, particlarly in its eighth iteration, has been notoriously buggy and unstable I still feel that there's plenty to recommend it as a piece of software. I've not had all that much direct contact with their customer support but I've never found them to be anything less than professional.

I respect that your experiences may be different, Tom, but, despite all it's problems, I really like it!



Philip.


--On 09 August 2012 12:33 +0200 Tom Swirly <tom@swirly.com> wrote:

I just want to add one point to this, and that's to say that after
several years of using Live, I deeply regret my decision to choose this
as my primary sequencer.  It's clearly not aimed at anyone who actually
writes songs, but worse, there is a level of arrogance to the company
where they simply refuse to admit the existence even very serious bugs
that have been repeatedly reported over years.


The classic example I point out is "stretching MIDI".  If you take a
MIDI sequence and stretch it in time in Live, it only moves the notes -
all other MIDI events (aftertouch, controllers, pitch bend, etc) stay
exactly where they were.


Since I play a WX-7, it means that I simply can't stretch any of my MIDI
sequences without completely breaking them.  


If you bring this up to the company, their response is that this is not a
bug, this is what it's supposed to do.  When you ask them to explain
under what circumstances anyone would use this behavior of moving only
notes and nothing else, they refuse to answer.  


If you ask them how you can do things like "record someone's performance
without a metronome and then adjust it to fit time" they tell you to use
a metronome, and then accuse you of being deliberately difficult when you
say you don't want to play with a metronome;  when you point out that
this is a common request from paying customers, they refuse to answer.  


And if you point out that Opcode Vision did this over 20 years ago and
all other sequencers do exactly this, they, you guessed it, refuse to
answer.


I feel trapped into it by Max For Live, but the instability (I have
literally crashed the M4L/Live combination over a thousand times) and
buggy nature of that program has meant that I really haven't gotten much
that I can actually use to reliably work in a live performance.


Don't make the mistake I did - pick anything other than Ableton Live.