NAMM Report: From Ableton - More Live, More Control
Ableton had big news on several fronts at its NAMM press conference. At the top of the bill are Ableton Live 8 and Ableton Suite 8. Live’s Warp engine is improved to allow adjusting individual audio events on the timeline. Overdub recording is made easier and more like classic sound-on-sound hardware devices with the new Looper. New effects plug-ins include a vocoder, a frequency shifter, overdrive, limiting, and a multiband dynamics processor. The premium FM synth, Operator, gets a facelift and some new features, and you’ll find a variety of under-the-hood workflow improvements.
Ableton Suite 8 adds a completely new sound library of grooves, presets, templates, and over 1,600 sounds. You also get a collection of Latin percussion instruments together with authentic clips and grooves. The new physical-modeled instrument, Collision, focuses on mallet instruments. Estimated release date for both versions of Live 8 is the second quarter of 2009.
Ableton has partnered with Akai to produce the APC40, a custom control surface tailored especially for live performance. It has 109 buttons, 16 endless rotary encoders, and 9 faders, and it conforms nicely to Live’s Session view for fast clip and scene triggering and control of Live’s plug-ins and mixer.
In another, much-anticipated development, Live’s partnership with Cycling 74 has produced Max for Live, which puts much of the power of Max/MSP inside Live. In short, it’s a toolkit for making or modifying custom devices directly within Live. Ableton anticipates an active community of device creators to fill the pipeline for those disinclined to create their own. Max for Live will be available later in 2009.
On the communal front, Live 8 makes it easier to share live sets with one-click upload and download to Ableton servers, online access management, and intelligent file transfer to optimize transfer times. The procedure should begin beta testing within the next few months.
Learn more about all these features at the Ableton Web site.
