Product Reviews

Less than a year after the release of Live 4 comes its bigger, better, brainier sibling. With each successive release, the Ableton team has extended Live's audio-warping skillset to encompass virtually every aspect of multitrack recording and the pace of development has been such that Live 5 can now be considered an out-and-out rival for the likes of Logic and Cubase, albeit a sequencing beast of a different stripe.

If you want to record live audio in a traditional multitrack fashion, you can. If you then want to take the resulting audio, warp it beyond recognition and create a spontaneous mix/remix in real time, you can do that, too. Live is not big on scoring facilities (in fact, it has none) or working with music-to-picture projects - for that, Cubase, Logic, Nuendo et al rule the roost.

But for instantly generating new ideas via a performance-oriented approach - literally jamming with your own songs to trigger new creative possibilities - Live is in a class of its own. Live 4 was a great leap forward for the program, introducing Midi sequencing and support for virtual instruments, and Live 5 continues this accelerated evolution from simple audio-warping tool into fully-featured audio/Midi recording sequencer.

The introduction of a Freeze function will be warmly welcomed by all, freeing up precious CPU power and facilitating the transfer of projects from greater to lesser computers. The whole track is frozen - not individual clips - but all frozen clips can be launched as normal in a Live Set. The freezing process should work with any clip, no matter how it has been created, and we had no problems freezing a wide range of VST and AU instruments and plug-ins.

Live 5 also sees the arrival of an oft-requested Midi tool: the Arpeggiator. It's been done with the usual Ableton panache, being highly flexible and offering huge scope for reworking the large number of enlivening presets supplied. Other VST Midi effects are also now supported in Live.

New audio plug-ins include a lovely Phaser and a decent Flanger (both featuring beat-synced LFOs); the Saturator 'dirtifier', for adding warmth, grit

ADVERTISEMENT

or distortion; the addictive Beat Repeat for stuttering, rhythmic cut-ups and Auto-Pan for sending your signals spinning in stereo. Importantly, full plug-in delay compensation has now been introduced throughout Live, plus tracks also have a manual Track Delay setting.

Another plug-in-related development are Device Groups, similar to Reason 3's Combinator, whereby you can save multi-effect creations. Take a Midi effect, a Simpler instrument and several audio effects, for instance, and meld them together into a single new bite-size Simpler preset. You can group any number of devices in this way, which means less CPU punishment all round.

Plug-in preset management has also been improved - simply double-click or drag and drop a setting from the Library window to load it or use the new 'browse' button for easy preset auditioning.

Behind the headline news, there are also many quietly important changes. Arrangement View navigation has been improved, such that where you click is where Live plays. The new Clip Transport similarly allows immediate playback from any point within a waveform. Reference Locators can be dropped on a file during playback and navigation can be determined by assigning a Midi message or computer key. Mackie Control-compatible devices are also now supported.

Further, MP3 files can be imported and there is a corresponding Automatic Tempo-Matching facility and Complex Warp mode to analyse layered files, such as stereo mixdowns. New Live Clips can be exported for reuse and each Clip retains all Midi, audio, envelopes, warping and clip settings along with any associated instrument and effects. Dropping a Live Clip into a Set recreates every aspect of the original. Finally, count-in recording is now possible and changes can be made to multiple clips simultaneously.

Nothing's ever perfect, of course. You still can't view the Undo history and selectively unravel recent actions; certain composition tools, as noted above, are lacking, and it also occurs to us that Ableton has made a rod for its own back by issuing its undeniably impressive Operator synth as a paid-for extra, rather than including it as part of Live.

However, free stuff not withstanding, Live 5 remains a superb product. It is the best at what it does - treating audio like sonic Play-Doh - and the fact that musicians these days expect to be able to speed up, pitch up and generally mash up audio with such playful malleability is almost entirely down to Live.

With the winning hand that Live plays with each new release, it should come as no surprise to find Ableton's increasingly capable and hugely enjoyable sequencer elbowing its way onto the Macs of many previously sceptical musicians.