Beat Box: Ableton Live 8 Released!

So this is pretty much the reason why I haven't been updating my journal on this site for the last 3 or 4 days- I've been spending all my free time since thursday playing around with the new version of Ableton! As most know, Ableton announced version 8 of their software at the NAMM conference in January. There was no official release date, but most predicted it would be in April, so they were right on schedule with it's launch. A lot of lucky participants were able to beta test the new version during February/March and from the comments posted on their message board it looked that feedback in general was overwhelmingly positive.

I'm going to try to do a multi-part detailed review of the update over the month of April, but here's what I think of it so far in a nutshell:

-I upgraded from the basic Live 7 to the full-blown Live 8 suite. If you're downloading the suite, give yourself ample time, there are almost 2 gigs of files you have to download!

-Ableton e-mailed many longtime customers $30 coupon codes in January when they announced the update. DO NOT forget about this, I don't think they're going to send reminder emails about it.

-I bought the Korg NanoKontrol in February, and in the box was a $50 coupon off the purchase of Live 7. When purchasing Live 8 it only allowed me to enter in one coupon code (which I did for the one Ableton sent me in January). So I personally didn't try to get the NanoKontrol discount so I'm not sure whether or not it will actually work for Live 8, I haven't heard any success stories about it yet on the message board so chances are it won't.

-The new Operator synth is great! Coming from a few years experience with subtractive synthesis I was actually surprised at how quick I was able to pick up on the concept of additive synthesis (which Operator uses), but overall it's user friendly and very flexible when it comes to layering sounds. Love how you can choose different signal paths. Live 8 introduces what is technically version 2 of Operator, and the biggest change is the fact you can now draw in your envelopes manually with a pencil tool. A nice feature to yield more control over how you craft your sounds.

-The Latin Percussion samples are great. The download was a couple hundred megs but it's worth it. There's tons of brushes, congas, tambourines, shakers, etc as well as several pre-constructed kits so you can just drop in your drum rack and get going right off the bat. I think I'll be using these a lot.

-The suite BOX edition is about $80 more than the download but I think with the box version you get additional DVD's with more high quality drum samples (30 gigs!) as well as a printed version of the instruction manual.

-Live 8 adds a new warping algorithm called "complex pro" which I haven't experimented with too much, but I do think that the new overall warping interface makes more sense and I've found that when bringing in samples I've had to do less manual warping than I had to with Live 6 and 7. A couple shorter samples with well-defined transients that I brought in Ableton warped them almost perfectly.

-Groove tools are pretty easy to get the hang of and was a welcome addition. The global groove tool that Reason 4 introduced was pretty kickass and a tough act to follow, so nice work Ableton. I've only messed with it a little bit so I'm not sure how it impacts the sound quality of your sample. However I love how you can extract the groove of an existing clip and use it elsewhere.

-I'm sticking to my Akai s950 for timestretching ;)

-CPU usage is about the same as Live 7, I think as long as you're on an Intel Core Duo or similar chip you'll be ok. If you have an older setup like a Pentium 4 or Mac G4/G5 you will probably still be able to run Live 8 but will be limited in terms of the number of channels and effects you can have going in one project.