Ableton 12 - Generative MIDI, Multiband Distortion and more

[apoclypse]

Does anyone else think the interface is starting to get a bit cluttered as of version 12?

Nope. In fact the UI has become more usable for me than it ever has been. It’s still clean but not at the expense of functionality like it was before.

[jonljacobi]

Yeah, less clunky, but more icons and "stuff". What I really wish for all the DAWs is greater customization. Trying to be all things to all people is great, but being able to hide stuff you never use would likely benefit all of us.

[SLiC]

Yeah, less clunky, but more icons and "stuff". What I really wish for all the DAWs is greater customization. Trying to be all things to all people is great, but being able to hide stuff you never use would likely benefit all of us.

Bigwig has a nice compromise, nothing much on the menu bar to start but then you can 'pin' shortcut icons to the top bar. That said, I do prefer the overall look of Live and don't find it cluttered on my large monitor.

[jonljacobi]

I love Bigwig's look, approach, and a lot of the interface, but there are several things related to basic recording and editing that I find very inefficient. I was a fan early on, but settled on Live as much quicker for my needs.

[HOTF]

friendly reminder that there is plenty of ablewon vs bitwig thread. This is a thread about Live 12. cheers

[HOTF]

del

[machinesworking]

Yeah, less clunky, but more icons and "stuff". What I really wish for all the DAWs is greater customization. Trying to be all things to all people is great, but being able to hide stuff you never use would likely benefit all of us.

I think Ableton a long time ago took the Apple approach to development, there are no teams of people who came up with the iPhone, it was Jobs and suggestions from the developers and designers. For better or worse Ableton take the same approach, build the DAW they would use, not what a research department tells them people want.

Long way of saying after using Live for 20 years it's pretty obvious they do things the way they want to do them. It took 15 odd years for them to give us a shortcut for full screen editing.

If you want a fully customizable DAW that would be Reaper, but you're starting from ground zero there, a truly cluttered mess of an interface with the default settings.

[liquidsound]

Funny but true…

[SLiC]

None of those things particularly bother me, as someone who uses Live and Bitwig the thing that I find most annoying about Live is not being able to edit the audio in clip view…I keep forgetting and it seems so wrong!

[Yorrrrrr]

Out of the features requested, plugin sandboxing would be the most wanted to me. This is crucial for stability in a live performance oriented software such as Live. I'd bet at least 80% of program crashes would be solved. And the other killer feature would be to include a quality native pitch correction device. I hope Ableton add these in a future version.

The way freeze and flatten in one command ('bounce-in-place") was implemented in 12, is fine by me. No need to have MIDI and audio in the same track.

Would be great to have freeze groups, shortcut for clip gain, hiding tracks, assign fade to multiple clips, more collections and capture automation, but none of those are extremely important to me, they just would be nice for convenience.

[DrGonzo]

Mac users and beta testers of 12:

Do you know if you can have more than one project open at the same time? I know there is a mode you can activate for Windows, but for Mac you have to do a Terminal hack something I really don't want to involve myself with.

[jules99]

Mac users and beta testers of 12:

Do you know if you can have more than one project open at the same time? I know there is a mode you can activate for Windows, but for Mac you have to do a Terminal hack something I really don't want to involve myself with.

From what I can see, there is neither an option, nor any other way to load more than one project at a time on a mac in Live 12.

One thing, I wish for with the new browser, is a way to automatically get tags for a new plug-in from the cloud, at least optionally. Right now, I have hundreds of untagged VSTs, which make this part of the new browser workflow a bit pointless.

If there was an option to say "Sync tags to Ableton Cloud tags" where everyone willing to participate could upload how they tagged a plug-in and the community could use that - that would be awesome. But I'm not holding my breath for that.

I'm also hoping that they add "Find similar sound" to the context menu when right-clicking any audio file in the arrangement, not browser. Right now you can go into your project folder and do it from there, but it would be much easier to just do it directly from the arrangement view.

[Ou_Tis]

Out of the features requested, plugin sandboxing would be the most wanted to me. This is crucial for stability in a live performance oriented software such as Live. I'd bet at least 80% of program crashes would be solved. And the other killer feature would be to include a quality native pitch correction device. I hope Ableton add these in a future version.

The way freeze and flatten in one command ('bounce-in-place") was implemented in 12, is fine by me. No need to have MIDI and audio in the same track.

Would be great to have freeze groups, shortcut for clip gain, hiding tracks, assign fade to multiple clips, more collections and capture automation, but none of those are extremely important to me, they just would be nice for convenience.

But I'd guess there's still no way to deactivate individual plugins so they don't contribute to latency, right?

[inkwarp]

The way freeze and flatten in one command ('bounce-in-place") was implemented in 12, is fine by me. No need to have MIDI and audio in the same track.

I'm a little confused about this. I must be missing something but isn't the point about freeze and flatten is that it freezes the midi and created an audio file as well? You cannot unfreeze with this option so you lose the midi track..? What's the point otherwise?

[Yorrrrrr]

The way freeze and flatten in one command ('bounce-in-place") was implemented in 12, is fine by me. No need to have MIDI and audio in the same track.

I'm a little confused about this. I must be missing something but isn't the point about freeze and flatten is that it freezes the midi and created an audio file as well? You cannot unfreeze with this option so you lose the midi track..? What's the point otherwise?

What I meant is that in Live 12 you can freeze and flatten an entire track (in a single step), but you still cannot freeze and flatten a piece of MIDI so you end up having both audio and MIDI clips in the same track (there's no "hybrid" tracks in Live).

However, though not ideal, it's no big deal as you still can easily workaround this particular scenario with additional 1 or 2 quick steps (duplicating, deactivating, etc.).