Ableton announces Live 8

Posted by Togeo Studios on January 16th, 2009 | 0 Comments »

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Yes we are fanboys of Live and with the announcement of the new version Live 8 and Live 8 Suite to be released in the second quarter of 2009, Ableton has just given us another reason to continue in their club. Last years update introduced drum racks, a slew of new enhancements and a reworked 64 bit audio engine that was a big improvement over the predecessor and really got us on-board. But Ableton Live 8, on the other hand, has really pulled out all the big guns.

They have added a much wanted Groove Engine, to pep up a boring old drum track, you can load groove patterns in from their library or extract the groove from an audio clip or create your own. They can be previewed from the Live browser and it all works in real-time as well. Once you have the groove you want you can commit it to the clip.

You asked and they delivered, with the new Looper device making realtime capture of loops a breeze. Live sampling sessions has never been easier. It automaticaly syncs itself with live and provides remote control of record, play, overdub or manage them by dragging and dropping layers of Live performances on the fly.

Live 8 comes with a reworked warp engine that improves upon one of the best parts of the whole Live music production experience. With new complex warp featuring Elastique Pro technology and updated beats modes your clips and loops will always beat match and sync to perfection.

Akai APC40 dedicated Ableton Live control surface.

Five new effects including a vocoder, overdrive, limiter, pitch shifter and multiband dynamics, will make production and mastering a joy. Plus there have been many requested enhancement and workflow improvement to make Ableton Live 8 even more intuitive than ever. This is truly a massive upgrade from Ableton that should satisfy users of the core product a lot with some long sought improvements like more than 128 parameters from VST plugins, midi editing enhancements, group tracks and crossfading between clips in the arrangement view.

There are new additions to the Suite and boxed versions of Live 8 including a world class sound library, Latin percusion, an improved version of Operator with many new features and a new instrument and effect from AAS called Collision and Corpus. Collision is a synth that can produce struck mallet and percussive styles of sounds Corpus is a resonance effect made especially for Collision.

max4live Two major highlights that are coming later this year from Ableton are Max for Live which will integrate the Cycling74 graphic programming enviroment MaxMSP into Live 8 and the new Akai APC40 Pro midi controller. The APC40 Professional was designed specifically as a control unit for use within Live. Max for Live will allow custom built effects, instruments and control device patches which can be shared between Live users utilising the Live 8 built in file sharing capabilities. Collaborations and sharing of Live sets with other users across the world wide web are quick and simple with Live 8.

They also have a special offer for new Live customers who buy Live7 or Live7 Suite before March 31, 2009. For a lot more information and video presentations of all the new Live 8 features and enhancements visit the Ableton website.