I've spent a majority of the day today playing with a demo of Ableton's Live software. First thoughts, it seems pretty cool and extremely easy to use. It definitely makes it easy to make tracks right away and stay in the groove. Supposedly you can use VSTs and it's also a Rewire application (I can run reason into it...) so that's a definite plus for me. The audio editing seems easy and fun, the effects that it comes with seemed decent, and with the ability to use VST effects it definitely expands that option.
On the negative side, I only got to work with samples and loops that the program came with (it was a demo, and I'm using it on a computer that I don't have my equipment hooked up to). Reminded me a lot like Acid in the way that you basically just load up loops and such into the program and put them together. I guess that's cool, if you've already premade your loops, otherwise it sucks.
As the name of the program suggests, it definitely seems geared towards live performance. Another thing I like with it, is that I could make changes in realtime without effecting my groove. No matter what I did to a loop, it would still sound pretty decent as I was changing it. I'd like to mess around with a registered version of the program so that I could maybe use it to add VST fx to my Reason application. If anyone comes across a full version of Ableton's Live please let me know.
ableton.com
On the negative side, I only got to work with samples and loops that the program came with (it was a demo, and I'm using it on a computer that I don't have my equipment hooked up to). Reminded me a lot like Acid in the way that you basically just load up loops and such into the program and put them together. I guess that's cool, if you've already premade your loops, otherwise it sucks.
As the name of the program suggests, it definitely seems geared towards live performance. Another thing I like with it, is that I could make changes in realtime without effecting my groove. No matter what I did to a loop, it would still sound pretty decent as I was changing it. I'd like to mess around with a registered version of the program so that I could maybe use it to add VST fx to my Reason application. If anyone comes across a full version of Ableton's Live please let me know.
ableton.com