Ableton 9.5/Push2

[thecontrolcentre]

I didn't have time to check this out - are the new sound packs already included in the upgrade?

You have to download the Max For Live Essentials pack to get the new instruments, but I think everything else is included.

[Orbit-50]

I meant renaming the parameter pages, thats really unfortuntate. Ubermap has had this worked out hacker style for awhile but such a sloppy solution is really quite silly. hopefully ableton will enable plugin developers to make their own mappings, that would be ideal.

Hell no! They've proven this, by just making the next Push and not even addressing this issue. It's as if you are not under any circumstances, supposed to use Push comfortably with any 3rd party stuff. As cool as Push is, what, with being deeply integrated into Live, I'm pretty sure that I can't be the only one that wants to make proper, usable mappings for the third party software that I have. That's my gripe with this whole thing. I figured they'd take care of this eventually, but I guess not. They've just moved on to the next one. I thought Ableton was better than this. It's proven to me, once and for all, that you can not buy hardware, from software companies because they never finish the firmware and the software properly. They stop development and move on to something else. I will give a little bit of credit to NI for their tenacity in developing Maschine. I never thought they would stick it out.

I wouldn't hold your breath on workflow enhancements, at least until live 10 is released. ableton seem to do all their updating at once while incremental updates are used to fix bugs and add small features. have 1 controller than 2...

It's as if they can not change Live at all, or add major refinements. You're basically looking at Live 20 right now. Cubase is the same thing, but at least they are making great strides when they do upgrades. That's why I believe in Studio One and Bitwig. Why? Because they are the newborn baby with a chance to grow and learn and were born far more advanced than Live, while Ableton is the old man that can't learn anything new and who's life cycle has been run.





Disclaimer: Not saying Live is useless. It's still a good usable DAW as is and I'm sure that many users still love it. I'm disgruntled because I'm forced to give up on it and I don't want to.

[BDeep]

I'm enjoying the new synths, especially the Drum Synth ...

Is there a new drum synth? The only ones I know are the ones that were always included since Live 9.. Or have they updated them?

[zerocrossing]

I'll repurchase Push when Ableton decides to take their stupid poly pressure (poly aftertouch) filter off.

[memyselfandus]

I'll repurchase Push when Ableton decides to take their stupid poly pressure (poly aftertouch) filter off.

Why do they have that on there?

[thecontrolcentre]

I'm enjoying the new synths, especially the Drum Synth ...

Is there a new drum synth? The only ones I know are the ones that were always included since Live 9.. Or have they updated them?

Yeah, if you have suite. Its included in the Max For Live Essentials pack, along with a mono synth (Bass), a poly synth (Poli) and one other new synth (Multi).
https://www.ableton.com/en/live/new-in-9-5/

[zerocrossing]

I'll repurchase Push when Ableton decides to take their stupid poly pressure (poly aftertouch) filter off.

Why do they have that on there?

To piss me off.

[BDeep]

I'm enjoying the new synths, especially the Drum Synth ...

Is there a new drum synth? The only ones I know are the ones that were always included since Live 9.. Or have they updated them?

Yeah, if you have suite. Its included in the Max For Live Essentials pack, along with a mono synth (Bass), a poly synth (Poli) and one other new synth (Multi).
https://www.ableton.com/en/live/new-in-9-5/

Ah yeah, I was confused as I thought it was something new for 9.5, but only these 3 synths are. I rarely reach for them, if it's not in my regular VST list I tend to overlook it, same with Razor for instance.

[mcnelson]

A lot of new Max devices accompanied Max 7 as well, if I'm not mistaken? There's hidden gems in that there library...

[BDeep]

Oh yes, there's some great stuff! And then there's the maxforlive.com user library, which contains some gems as well. What I especially like about M4L is that it allows for nice MIDI manipulation without complicated routing. I wish Ableton would support AU MIDI FX, like Logic does these days.

[beauchamp]

A post from Andy Cytomic on another forum
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As already mentioned previously the summing of digital signals is not the weak point of DAWs. Using "floating point" arithmetic is very accurate, and the change in scale is on a per sample basis, so you get 24 bit accuracy per sample no matter what the scale. This means every single quiet sample and every single loud sample all have the the accuracy of 24-bits. This level of accuracy is way beyond what the most expensive sound card can achieve.

Differences that can be heard won't be to do with summing. So what are they?

The audio delay caused by plugins has been sample accurately compensated for some time in Live, so no phase problems there. Before Live 9.2 every third party plugin added to the effect chain would add an audio buffer of latency, which would be compensated for in terms of audio summing, but not in terms of automation being sent to plugins afterwards. As of Live 9.2 third party plugins don't add this extra audio buffer of latency. The only latency that gets added is any caused by the plugin itself by lookahead or oversampling etc. In addition automation is now also latency compensated, so for plugins that do add latency the automation sent to plugins afterwards now lines up properly (sample accurate for most Live devices, to the nearest audio buffer for others).

Why does this matter? This may impact how hard rhythmic transitions in automation are heard, for example hard stabbing step sequencing of the filter cutoff to make a musical pattern every 16th note. Earlier versions of Live would sound sloppy in this area, so programming such patterns would just sound wrong and the steps would not line up with 16th notes, but instead be too early and move even further out of position as more third party plugins were added before the filter (i.e. the plugin one having automation sent to it). Not good, but now fixed in Live 9.2.

Warping and realtime sample rate conversion is another area that can make things sound muddy. These are useful if you want a dynamic tempo, but otherwise you don't have to use them. Live has a global setting for the quality of these realtime conversions, and also a setting for resampling on bounce. If you want more quality you will have to use more CPU, but the options are there to use. If you don't need dynamic tempo then don't use warping and make sure to use an offline sample rate converter on your audio to get it to your project's sample rate before you import the sample.

A related problem is plugins with their own sequencers that slave off the DAW's song position clock. If a plugin adds latency before a plugin with it's own sequencer then the clock signal is not latency compensated, so the sequencer plugin will be out of time in all versions of Live including Live 9.

The last remaining area for attention is the inbuilt effects. In Live 8 and before there were many "Single precision DF1 biquads" which are EQ sections that are very efficient, but don't sound good when the cutoff frequency is low with respect to the sample rate. If you set a high pass filter with a cutoff of 30 hz in Live 8 using EQ-8 it will actually add low frequency rumble up around -60 dBFS, which is definitely audible. I designed and implemented a linear SVF EQ algorithm for Live 9's EQ-8, which is the lowest noise algorithm on the planet given processing using all floating point computation (i.e. all state and coefficients use the same floating point precision numbers). There are still some of the old DF1 biquads in certain effects in Live 9, but they are all being replaced with the new SVF algorithm.

And that's about it that I can think of right now. I will continue to help Ableton improve the audio quality of their program, and in the next few years developments are afoot that will raise the bar even further and hopefully make Live a tool that people export from other DAWs to use for mix finalising and mastering.

PS: If people love the "Natural Phase" option of FabFilter Pro-Q2 then you can right click on the title bar of Live 9's EQ-8 and select "oversample". This does the same thing but with a shorter linear phase oversampling filter, so it has lower latency, lower cpu, and slightly lower quality, but still de-cramps both the amplitude and phase of the EQ and sounds fantastic. I don't know of any other DAWs that have such an advanced feature, and this was added for the release of Live 9, so around 1 1/2 years before Pro-Q2 was released!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
beauchamp

[pdxindy]

I meant renaming the parameter pages, thats really unfortuntate. Ubermap has had this worked out hacker style for awhile but such a sloppy solution is really quite silly. hopefully ableton will enable plugin developers to make their own mappings, that would be ideal.

Hell no! They've proven this, by just making the next Push and not even addressing this issue. It's as if you are not under any circumstances, supposed to use Push comfortably with any 3rd party stuff. As cool as Push is, what, with being deeply integrated into Live, I'm pretty sure that I can't be the only one that wants to make proper, usable mappings for the third party software that I have. That's my gripe with this whole thing. I figured they'd take care of this eventually, but I guess not. They've just moved on to the next one. I thought Ableton was better than this. It's proven to me, once and for all, that you can not buy hardware, from software companies because they never finish the firmware and the software properly. They stop development and move on to something else. I will give a little bit of credit to NI for their tenacity in developing Maschine. I never thought they would stick it out.

9.5 adds functionality for Push 1 ... so development has not stopped

[dredd i knight]

Great update. Loving the warping feature in simpler and the new filter models.

One question though - why in the f**k couldn't they implement warping in sampler?? Did i miss something? They make an effort and put the new filter models, great, but no warping in their flagship software sampler?!

That's just stupid, ableton.

One major reason is the fact sampler, isn't available to all Live users, since it's a paid add on. This way, out the gate, it's available to everyone. I'm reasonably confident it will get ported to sampler in time. Imagine it was only available to sampler users; a whole selection of Live users would be locked out on day one, at least this way, we all get to play.

[andy-cytomic]

Great update. Loving the warping feature in simpler and the new filter models.

One question though - why in the f**k couldn't they implement warping in sampler?? Did i miss something? They make an effort and put the new filter models, great, but no warping in their flagship software sampler?!

That's just stupid, ableton.

Normally Devs just click their fingers and the work is done, so I too wonder why this large chunk of work hasn't been completed

I think it was most important to get slicing and warping in Simpler first since usually you don't need multi-sample velocity switching of which loop you're slicing or which sample you're warping, although the latter could be useful in some contexts. With Push 2 needing a decent sampling and slicing workflow I know if it was my choice I too would have implemented all this stuff in Simpler first, since not everyone owns Suite or Sampler.

I was not involved with doing any of this apart from having designed and implemented the filter algorithms, but I know from my own software development it takes lots of time and effort to implement features like this and make sure the workflow is good, so Please email Ableton and encourage them to also implement warping in Sampler if that is what you want, I'm sure they'll listen.

[JonSolo]

Thanks for that input Andy.

I have not been a huge "pusher" for Ableton, but now it is getting closer to my workflow. This update and the new Push may be what I need to commit. Push2 looks awesome...but function-wise is right where I would want it.

Maybe it's time for a big move for me.