Live 4 is five time better than Tracktion?

[Robert Randolph]

It sounds like you really need to spend more time with the guitar so you don't have to mess around with this kind of stuff when recording. If you could actually play the part that might help. Computers are good tools, but please don't use them as a crutch...

Yeah, and let's all be sure to play in perfect time so that we don't have to use the quantize function.

People did it for 100's of years. It was called practice.... long lost art I guess. Long days of practicing with the music (i.e. rest of the band/orchestra) to play everything in perfect time.

Such a grand future where actually doing things well is easily replaced by a computer fixing the mistakes

[pHz]

Such a grand future where actually doing things well is easily replaced by a computer fixing the mistakes

depends on your attitude though ...

... i leave a lot of sequencing / mixing / recording 'mistakes' in my stuff ... its when you start getting anal about perfection that the computer sucks all the life out of your music

slainte rob

[Lunch Money]

Just to add to what's already been said--

When I tried out Live (just the Delta 1.5, not Live 4), I was amazed and excited, while mucking around with the demo song that came with it. This thing has possibilities, I thought!

Then when I tried to do my own song, it ceased making sense for me. I do NOT do live playing, and all the songs that I write have a thought-out arrangement, so I approach the sequencer after the song's been planned out already, beginning to end.

Since Tracktion's audio editing is excellent, if I DO decide to change the bridge or whatnot, I haven't had any problems doing so.

To me, as a songwriter/guitarist, Live simply isn't useful, regardless of how powerful (and also fun!) it is.

Like others have said, apples and oranges.

Greg

[pHz]

to add a contrasting view ...

... i VERY rarely plan composisitions out in advance - tending to find sounds and sequences as i go ...

... doing this in tracktion was pretty easy but needed a LOT of moving clips around and cutting / pasting to get combinations and layers working ...

... doing this in live is SO much quicker ... throw in or compose some loops / samples / MIDI sequences and jam with them to work out what sounds good with what ... set these combinations up as scenes and then record these triggered live ... theres your basic composition ... then go into arrangement view and add stuff / tweak / modify / automate / etc ...

... all this without having to worry about tempo or syncing

i REALLY like live (but still switch between it and tracktion depending on what i want to do and my mood)

slainte rob

[Eriansa]

in fact the beginning question was wrong : you can't compare apples with oranges.
Lineair working -> Tracktion is the number one
Pattern based working -> Live / FlStudio / Orion....

just my 2cts.

[AD80]

Honestly, I think if you work strictly in a linear fashion then Tracktion is the stronger application. I find using Live in a linear way somewhat painful......

Stole the words right out of my brain.

[ancientoak]

You can play any number of different audio clips on one track, one after the other? ...You do have to leave space before and after audio recordings, if you want to have a nice decay, or flexibility in timing...

Yes one after the other, but not the other before the one ends, see? If you've recorded 4 bars of audio it has to be cut exactly where bar 5 starts if you want to play another 4 bars right after. This cut is often unnatural.

[kovacs]

Yes one after the other, but not the other before the one ends, see? If you've recorded 4 bars of audio it has to be cut exactly where bar 5 starts if you want to play another 4 bars right after. This cut is often unnatural.

Isn't that the entire point of multitracking? You have that in the arrange view in Live. I do this, works fine. In arrange view Live 4 actually feels very much like Tracktion (I own both).

[ancientoak]

I've tried the demo again now, and sorry, no, I cannot get this to work...

[stale bread]

I don't know why these myths persist regarding Ableton Live, I'd type in all capitals but that would
be rude.

1. Live is not just for playing loops Live, please read the manual or at least look at the overview on the front page of the ableton site, the truth of what live can do will smack you in the face.

Myth number 2. you don't have to use the session view if you don't want to, in the arranger view Live is just like any other app, you can drag the end of a clip just like in sonar or like acids paint if you want to extend a loop all the way to grandmas house if you want. you can move audio around just click on it and hold the mousebutton down and drag it where ever you want.

myth 3. you don't have to use loops if you don't want
for little peteys sake, turn off the loop function. now you have a bunch of audio that is recorded and not looped on however many tracks you want going from left to right like every other daw on earth.

myth 4. stop acting like lives arranger view is something you've never seen, its the standard daw thingy , very standard on top with some not so standard goodies in the inbetween places. they are not apples and oranges just because lives midi is a little better, if you find nothing bizzar about linear editing in tracktion you shouldn't find lives
arranger view hard to use, its almost the same, sure some diff features but for reg multitrack record they're more alike than not.

i feel sorry for all the people feeling like they can't use live unless they're using a powerbook on stage playing some experimental loop music, thats such a crock of cock.

[Lunch Money]

I have to admit, I didn't use it long enough to notice that aspect of it; and the tutorial they give does not get into it, either.

The default settings make it a pretty much "compose on the fly" kind of application, though of course you can change and move around events as you see fit.

Bottom line-- out of the box, it is not as powerful or intuitive a linear compositional tool as Tracktion. If you CAN set it up to do similar things (sounds like a bit of work), it doesn't seem to do them better enough to justify 5X the cost, which was the original question posed in the thread, after all.

Sure, it's a full-featured sequencer... but they didn't call it "Live" for nothing-- it has its origins, and regardless of current functionality, those origins persist. I could just as easily argue that Tracktion can be used for live performance, which it can-- just not in as powerful a way as Live (by a long shot).

Greg

[sojuman]

Thanks everyone for sharing your experience and viewpoints. I'm sure Live 4 is an awesome program. I think I don't "get it" yet because I simply do not have enough experience. I think Tracktion and my current state of mind somehow clicked.

I briefly considered Mackie's "Spike" audio interface, which includes a full version of Tracktion and limited edition of Live 3 for $400 bucks. Since I already have my excellent Omni I/O + Delta 66, it would not be a wise choice for me after all. So I finally decided to get Tracktion and then later pick up a keyboard/audio interface combo (e.g. Keystation's firewire version) for my laptop.

[stale bread]

hey fair enough, not burning anybodys britches, I think tracktion is a great app, and will prob get it myself in the near future, its definitely worth the price and at a quality that there's no reason not to have it in your arsenal.
at first Live 4 made me want to shut everything out, i've been using it since ver getgo and thought forget
everything else, but now its turned around and enlightened me to how good the other things I want to use with it are, like fruity, reason, energy xt, and prob tracktion, so I now think of it as a very mind opening program that makes everything else even
better. but for some reason I'm still miffed about the money I spent on sonar, I don't think I need that one.

[ancientoak]

Stale bread, I can see your little rant came not only in response to me, but to all the people bent on categorizing live as one type of app. But for the tiny little point at hand (well, big to me, and I can't see how it isn't to anyone else) that is now growing to the limit of the thread space it can reasonably expect to seize:
I know you can use the (edit:) arranger view, it is all I have ever been interested in, yes it is beautiful, yes it works like a charm - except (and I quote this from the manual) A track can only play one clip at a time. And that's the point. The tails and natural decays of clips already playing will be cut short by one played directly after!

[koorby]

Well I tried the demo, and I really, really wanted to like it, but it's VSTi/VST support SUCKS!! Half the plugins that work 100% fine in Tracktion simply don't appear in the plugins list. That, my friends, is shite. That alone almost made me stop playing with the demo.

Secondly, I found it really hard to get my head around the whole Live concept, since my aproach to songwriting is fairly linear, and Live doesn't lend itself to well to the typical left-to-right approach.

Oh well, I tried, but I'm a Tracktion junkie now. No going back ... or "forward".

p.s. Jules - All I need is MFX support and MP3 encoding and I'd never have to use anything else