Product Reviews

Another year, another version of Live, as Ableton's sequencer revolution continues. This time around, the company has made a good fist of ticking off as many major objections to the program as possible, as well as introducing entirely new features to enhance the overall experience.

The big news in Live 6 is its improved efficiency; it's definitely faster. Ableton's focus was on multiprocessor support, so Live 6 will zip along happily on any new Mac, but older G4 and G5 Macs will also benefit from the speed boost. Certainly, opening Live 5 sets in Live 6 on a G4 PowerBook saw a marked reduction in the CPU meter - enough for a few extra audio tracks and plug-ins before the audio exhibited any glitches. This is good news for every Live user.

Should you need to eke even more mixing mileage out of your Mac, you can take advantage of the new Deep Freeze function. This means that even while deeply frozen (thus freeing up CPU power), clips can still be moved, duplicated and trimmed and mixer automation and envelopes can be edited. The Session view also continues to function pretty much as normal, plus you can drag a frozen Midi clip onto an audio track and have Live load it as a rendered audio sample. Finally, the Flatten command turns any frozen audio or Midi track into a standard clip, unfrozen and with all associated devices removed.

Also new to Live 6 are Racks, a concept reminiscent of Reason's Combinator, whereby a chain of devices can be saved as a single entity. Multiple layers and connections in parallel are possible, whether using instruments or effects, and several Racks can even be nested inside one another. A Rack also has a master control panel with macro knobs that can be assigned to any parameters in the chain, so you can control multiple parameters concurrently.

There are limitations with Racks, but these only really occur when your routings get fiendishly complex. For more routine uses, Racks are brilliant, capturing favourite setups and providing a lot of scope for customisation.

Another long-term user request answered by version 6 is movie import. You can drag-and-drop QuickTime movies onto the interface and add warp markers to align cues. Further, you can snap the video to bars or beats, and view the picture in a floating window or full screen on a second monitor. It's possible to add effects to the movie's audio track, which can be manipulated like any other audio in Live. You can even import multiple videos and cut and paste between them, as well as warping video playback speed to fit Live's project tempo, which is very cool.

The Essential Instrument Collection (EIC) is new to the boxed version of Live 6, dropping 14GB worth of multi-sampled instruments onto your hard disk, including pianos (acoustic and electric), strings, brass, woodwind, guitars and percussion. The EIC extends Live's compositional capabilities and bridges the gap between Live's traditional

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electronic heartland and its burgeoning acoustic recording and performance side.

Elsewhere, there are new and improved plug-ins, notably EQ Eight, Dynamic Tube and Saturator, while its file management tools help organise and archive projects. Midi Remote Mapping is supported for many control surfaces, and Midi messages can be multi-dimensional - that is, you can control several different devices simultaneously. Ableton has also improved Live's mixer meters, which have gained a decibel scale, a track volume box (to allow for incremental, numerical adjustments) and a peak level indicator. You can fold or hide this extra detail to save screen space on a per-track basis.

Other neat tricks up Live's copious sleeve include: ReWire master applications, such as Logic and Cubase, can route Midi to Live's Midi tracks; the master tempo of a Live set can now follow a clip's local tempo; you can warp multi-track recordings easily and at high quality, speeding up the work of remixing or compiling DJ sets; audio clips, Simpler, Impulse and Sampler files can also now be hot swapped as you test out sounds, leaving all other parameters intact; and you can also crop and trim samples.

Talking of samples, Live 6 sees the introduction of Ableton's second instrument, Sampler. A multi-sample playback and sound design tool extraordinaire, its existence is a natural extension of Live's sample-oriented ethos. It can import third-party libraries, including Akai, GigaStudio, EXS, SoundFont and Kontakt, as well as any standard audio file of your own making, with Sampler benefiting from Live's disk preloading technology to avoid Ram shortages. Surprisingly, Sampler isn't compatible with the EIC, whose library is restricted for use in Simpler, Live's free sample player.

Functionally, Sampler offers unlimited sample zones with key and velocity ranges, and crossfades, multimode and morphing filters, a polyphonic saturation stage for dirtying up any overly polite samples, a dedicated modulation oscillator, three LFOs, five multimode envelopes, Midi inputs and comprehensive control over the sample's behaviour. You can also direct Sampler to load samples from Ram instead of from disk, something that isn't possible with Simpler.

Sampler is a very good multi-sampler, providing all of the functionality of kindred spirits such as Logic's EXS24 and offering perfect Live integration to boot. Having so many parameters for easy and radical sample manipulation means any existing sounds you already have can be reworked and pressed into whole new worlds of service, and it's fascinating to transform a simple sound into something surreal but beautiful. The only downside is that it isn't free - Sampler is an optional extra, like Operator before it. This may be a sticking point for many people, but it's relatively inexpensive and is the ideal companion for much of Live's workflow, opening up new possibilities at every turn.

For us, Live is unequalled during the writing and exploration stages, allowing us to capture a basic song idea and quickly extrapolate its potential. It also comes into its own at the end of the mixing process, loading audio clips into Session slots and deconstructing the finished track, either for a deliberate remix or just for fun. For the work in between, which sequencer you choose all comes down to personal preference.

Overall, though, Live 6 is more than capable and comes impressively well equipped to do the job - whether that be recording, mixing, remixing or performing.