Live host comparison - your choices and why.

[tweakin]

What's your host of choice for playing live, and most importantly why?

I'm trying to work out what will be the best way to perform dance music live, and I'm keen to know why people use what they use.

I plan to go live with a laptop (possibly two), an x-station, edirol pcr50, an audiophile firewire, mackie 1402VLZ mixer, & some external fx.

Some friends use Ableton which blows me away (I think I'll go with it), but it seems limited in how I'd like to change the order of songs in a set (loading in a whole song at a time to mix with the current one etc..), and also change elements of a track one by one to mix between tracks, so semi djing/semi live kinda thing. I've heard that eXT & plogue bidule are good for this sort of thing, but I'd like some examples of how people who use these (or a combination of all of the above) and how I might configure them.

Any other thoughts on playing live electronic music are welcome- essentially, my aim is to be able to mix from one tune to another (in a flexible order) while being as 'hands on' with arrangement, and synthesis & fx manipulation as possible, but be able to stand back if necessary... not asking too much am I ?!?

[adamjay]

Ableton, hands down....

why? Its the most versatile. yea it has limitations, but far fewer limitations for live performance than most other apps.

its actually possible to copy clips from 1 Live .als to another.
so long as your audio and midi channels are lined up the same way in each .als you can actually select a set of clips, and COPY them.
open your other .als and PASTE them.

its not an advertised feature but it works.

here's a thread about it... not much info, but its a pre-existing forum conversation: http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18832

So you could easily(er) make an .als with all of your material ready to go. You could choose to play some material and not to play others. It all streams from disk (unless you ask it to stream from ram), so there's not a huge performance dent in having 12 songs as clips ready to go vs. 3.

you can't beat it for versatility