As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools.
In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, and power users can't be at their most productive because we're scared of complexity and build around the casual, computer illiterate user.
Imagine what Ableton would look like if they were only optimising for the user that wants to put a couple of pre-made loops together and call it a song.
Ableton Live is my absolute favorite piece of software right now. It fills me with a joy I haven't felt since I first learned HyperCard or Photoshop. It's just marvelous. In fact, it's so good that it makes it harder for me to finish music since I keep tinkering on things. But I can just sink hours into it without noticing the time pass.
It's so easy to get jaded with software these days because of freemium apps, dark patterns, social media apps hijacking human psychology to drive up engagement, etc. Ableton Live reminds me that software can be beautiful and empowering, and how good and natural it feels to just pay money for a well-crafted product.
Seriously. That alone has been one of the big things keeping me firmly in Logic Pro's camp.
I'm also glad they're starting to add more instruments to the default package (notably, finally; a proper 'Upright Piano') - as the value proposition of Ableton Standard at $400 vs Logic Pro at $200 has been extremely one-sided in Logic's favour for many, many years now.
I do understand, of course; I'm strictly speaking as a Mac user. I honestly have no idea about the DAW landscape for PC's. I am extremely reliant on exporting songs from GarageBand on my iPhone as I create beats on the go quite often - and opening those .garageband files in Logic Pro to seriously hone in on the sounds, keeping the original instruments and MIDI intact. It's an irreplaceable ecosystem for me.
I love the UX of Live, and especially how it seamlessly integrates with Push 2 - really a joy to use. It does offer a great amount of depth in terms of capabilities for power users, but always refers back to basic UI concepts that can be applied to many different contexts.
What truly amazes me though is the stability of the platform. Yes, it's great for home recording and casual use, but the same application is used as a core piece in live performances with huge audiences. There's not a lot of "consumer" software out there that I would trust with that. Ableton Live is certainly one of those.
Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.
If you want a DAW that is similar to Ableton and works on Linux, you should go with Bitwig, which is in some ways better and more modern than Ableton, but has a smaller user base.
Depending on your use-case there are a lot of options to consider before investing in a professional solution like Ableton Live.
- LMMS[1]: The go-to cross-platform FOSS DAW solution, with VST support and a healthy community.
- Ardour[2]: Much like LLMS, it's a classic Open Source project that runs cross-platform and is quite fully-featured.
- VCVRack[3]: A brilliant FOSS EuroRack Simulator. It has a built-in package manager with an enormous selection of officially supported and community submitted plugins, complete with VST and Linux support.
- Waveform Free[4]: By Tracktion, Waveform is a robust DAW with VST sandboxing and great built-in FX.
- Audio Tool[5]: A great web-based DAW, featuring online collaboration. Last I checked, there was no VST support.
- Bandlab[6]: Another web-based DAW by the folks behind Cakewalk. While it lacks VST support, it offers online collaboration and straight-forward defaults.
If you like scripting, Reaper[7] offers a personal license for $60 and supports Lua, Python, EEL2/JSFX, and it's own ReaScript[8]. Reaper offers a highly customizable, robust solution for power-users. While the above projects are some of the more complete projects, there are many more scattered around Github. If you're interested in the more niche/experimental ones, let me know and I'll reply with my more comprehensive list.
That being said, I've been an Ableton Live user for over a decade and I recommend it for anyone who wants to invest into a more serious music project. These days, I tend to reach for Studio One[9] by Presonus for more involved projects. While it lacks the focus on live performance, it is more feature-complete DAW than Ableton. Studio One doesn't have the same friction-less workflow that Ableton is famous for, but it's an absolute powerhouse when mastered. It's very well funded and one of the youngest, so Presonus had the opportunity to adopt the best features of more dated solutions like Cubase, Logic, Pro-Tools, and Ableton, while stripping away a lot of the bloat.
If you buy hardware they usually throw in software for free. I bought a usb-c audio interface and it came with cubase, and my midi controller came with ableton. They are light versions but they get the job done. It's enough that you can at least compare DAWs.
It's not free but I like to plug renoise whenever I can. It's more of a tracker than a traditional DAW, scriptable in lua. If you are a programmer you might like trackers.
"worthy open-sourced competitor to Ableton" is a very tall order, but if we're just looking at open source DAWs, a friend pointed out this one to me recently. https://lmms.io/
DAWs, especially ones like ableton, are one of those types of software where they aren't that difficult on paper but the entropy of one is high enough you need a team of people to get going in the first place
Usually Live Lite the free edition (8 tracks) is bundled with $50 MIDI keyboards, and is sufficient to get started with music production, recording and adding a few virtual instruments at least.
Have you tried the Lite version? I don't have keys right now but they come with hardware all the time and I already have a Suite licence. On the Ableton subreddit sometimes there's giveaways.
It's kind of like a gateway drug, because you can do a lot of stuff on the Lite version but all the "fun" things like all the bundled instruments and effects that let you use it like a modular synth or the scripting and automation goodness come only on the more expensive version.
It seems like they say nothing whether they optimised their audio engine. There are a couple of low hanging fruits that they avoid to pick for some reason that would vastly improve the performance. For example they could enable wrapping the VST plugins in their own separate processes. That means the operating system scheduler would be able to distribute the load on available cores in a more efficient way than Ableton currently does. Another is that when you have two tracks using the same send, then all paths that lead to the send with the send included work on the same core that means you can easily run into issues if you use more demanding plugins. Here the solution would be processing the tracks in parallel up to the point where it goes to the send - this could actually be solved by running plugins in separate processes.
One more feature related to performance improvements would be ability to freeze tracks just partially and freeze entire groups.
I think other features added are great, but they are kind of useless if you can't play anything because the audio engine can't keep up.
The problem is reducible to maximum directed cuts in arbitrary DAGs, which is hardly "low hanging fruit." The OS scheduler is a particularly poor choice of solution and introduces a ton of overhead while solving it suboptimally.
Granted you can use a lot of heuristics to figure out simpler solutions since DAW graphs aren't arbitrary DAGs and you can get clever with how you allow them to be constructed, but it's non obvious. That's why parallel performance varies a lot between daw engines.
I started out with Sam Aaron's Overtone, which completely blew my mind and reignited my musical interest. I got to a point where I was scratching the rough edges of it and I didn't want to follow him to Sonic Pi so I moved on to Ableton. It's awesome, leveled up my production game but the one thing I miss is the workflow of composing in a CIDER REPL, totally unbeatable. Guess I could just export the midi ... but I decided to buy a keyboard and learn to play keys.
This is the music I make[1]. The older, more piano-based songs are written in Overtone, and you'll here where they change up to be more textured and electronic sounding when I got into Ableton
Minor workflow improvements, but frankly not enough to get me pay for the update. The audio comping is nice. What I'd like to do is being able to run live as a VST inside Cubase, like FLstudio for instance. Cubase handles most of what I need for production and does it way better than Live, Live is more a creative tool than anything else, especially when it comes to complex studio setups with multiple monitoring, it is where Live completely fails.
I'm surprised at how many HNers seem to be into ableton. Very cool!
Just curious: do you guys buy the full version? It's so expensive that I've never been able to justify it. I actually have been using the free version that came with a midi controller I bought a few years ago, and even that has been great.
Be aware, that in reality, for live performance, you have to buy a costly Push device. This is if you want to create live loops of a specified length and have them start playing automatically. They crippled this feature in the DAW so that you have to buy a Push. They could have allowed you to do this without a Push in many different ways. There is a third party tool called BinkLooper which gets you there, sort of, but it's not like what they worked out with their Push. I don't want the Push on stage and I don't want to spend what is basically the price of Live all over again (plus have another expensive thing to have to upgrade again and again).
I don’t find this to be true. The Push is simply a remote control for the software and it controls features that already exist in the DAW. I don’t believe Ableton is hindering other manufacturer’s MIDI or SysEx integration. It’s strength is in it’s specificity and the fact that it is custom-tailored to Ableton Live alone and does not need to be some middle-of-the-road hardware device that also has to make sense with every other DAW.
I owned a Push 2 for 2 years before I sold it, and in my experience there is very little (if anything) it does that cannot be done with a 1:1 analogue in the software.
C'mon, anyone can easily find dozens of videos that prove otherwise. Also, the Push API is open, anyone can program python remote scripts to access it, that's how apps like Touchable work, completely false you have to buy a Push, don't need hardware nor M4L. Even if you don't know Python you can use ClyphX. And I talk about Live 10.
Now if ONLY they added things all other DAWs have - say, a mixer where you could see all your attached plugins at once? Try mixing a 100-channel project with a few plugins on most tracks where you have to click on the track first to see which plugins it has.
I'm completely baffled at why they can't just accept some standard designs that have become common practice over time and integrate them into the UI.
(I'm aware of the Options.txt hack which is unreliable and I'm not even sure it works with the latest Live 10)
I’m actually quite impressed with how Ableton came up with a UI that didn’t exist about 20 years ago and then stuck to it without trying to be all things to all people. The hardest thing to do is to say no.
What’s even more impressive is that they did not start out doing any user research. They made what they wanted and (pardon the pun) it struck a chord. If they had not had the courage to trust their instinct, but had done what so many designers do and focus on satisfying only the needs users can imagine and articulate, I think they would have made yet another Cubase or Protools lookalike. That’s a crowded market and they wouldn’t have made it.
Sure, I understand and agree with your criticism, but there are probably great tools that do what you ask for cleaner and better because those tools are designed around different ideas.
If they can squeeze this in and make it work: great. If they can’t, that’s okay too.
I love Ableton, but for mixdowns, you're right, the UI paradigm is awful. I use Ableton, Max, and Reaper to have the right tool for the job. For mixing, Reaper is the bomb. I know of a lot of pros who prefer it over everything, regardless of cost. It's just the most flexible mixing tool out there.
I believe it may have to do with the fact that Ableton is a performance tool first and foremost. It would follow that all design decisions stem from that requirement. Yes it is a full-featured DAW like Logic or Pro Tools, but Ableton differentiate themselves by supporting that paradigm and that leads them to configurations that are unconventional for non-performance-oriented DAWs:
1. Having all instruments and plugins in a horizontally-oriented trough allows quick drag-and-drop rearrangement. So if you want to rearrange their order very quickly you can do it. In Pro Tools it would be a two click operation at best and depending on how your plugins are arranged it could be significantly more than that.
2. It allows you to reach the knobs on their native instruments and plugins without the need to open/close plugin windows first.
3. MIDI mapping becomes much quicker and intuitive when you can simply toggle the MIDI/Keyboard mapping overlay for a given plugin.
4. Their Instrument Rack/Drum Rack/Midi Rack devices are very flexible in their capabilites. Being able to nest plugins within them like macros and then quickly hide or reveal a dozen plugins within a single rack is great for declutterring an otherwise busy interface.
As someone who mixes most of their projects in Ableton, their Rack paradigm allows me to condense a lot of parallel processing into a single instrument/audio channel. This makes for a very clean representation of very complex processing. To do a similar task such as having three channels of parallel processing on a single channel in Pro Tools involves either sending them to as many return channels, or creating duplicates of that channel which all have their own parallel processing chains. This creates way more clutter on the screen.
That said, you CAN still have Ableton's plugins displayed in the manner you prefer. It's a hidden feature that's not documented. Pretty easy to setup, but not discoverable. It's an option that they developed but decided not to include in the final version. Here's a tutorial: sonicbloom.net/en/ableton-live-insider-tips-options-txt-part-1/
I have a love hate relationship with Live. Its 95% exactly what I want, and there is so much great hard and software integration. But beyond making a few cool loops of stacked elements I never seem to make a song with it. I CAN make music with other apps, so I just dont jive with Live. However, I feel like I just am perpetually 1 'aha' moment away from it being my go to DAW, so I keep upgrading it. So yes, I just bought the upgrade to Live suite 10 which gives me 11 for free...
Something I find interesting is that they're adding built-in entropy to this update. You will now be able to set the probability that a MIDI note will fire in a melody. Or set a range of probabilities for the velocity value of a MIDI note. I'm sure that you will be able to map the range probabilities to the ADSR of synths etc... I'm curious if that is more of a novelty or will actually be a valuable tool for exploring ideas.
I haven’t recorded for years, but when I first used Live I fell in love with it instantly. Two of these features (tempo following and velocity chance) are compelling enough I may get back behind a guitar. They were ideas I had years ago and considered trying to build myself but I had no idea where to begin. Good showing, Ableton!
I absolutely love playing around on Ableton, and this update has me excited for those randomization/naturally themed effects they're adding.
One thing I love about sound design is playing with randomization and effects to make really quirky sounds, and those new devices and features are gonna be a blast for me.
I have version 9 and have difficulty figuring out how to do simple things with it. Like how do I take an existing MP3 recording and make it one of the tracks but synchronize the beats with those of the existing tracks?
[+] [-] sph|5 years ago|reply
In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, and power users can't be at their most productive because we're scared of complexity and build around the casual, computer illiterate user.
Imagine what Ableton would look like if they were only optimising for the user that wants to put a couple of pre-made loops together and call it a song.
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
It's so easy to get jaded with software these days because of freemium apps, dark patterns, social media apps hijacking human psychology to drive up engagement, etc. Ableton Live reminds me that software can be beautiful and empowering, and how good and natural it feels to just pay money for a well-crafted product.
[+] [-] breakfastduck|5 years ago|reply
I would be buying the upgrade if that was the only feature but there's so many!
[+] [-] lostgame|5 years ago|reply
I'm also glad they're starting to add more instruments to the default package (notably, finally; a proper 'Upright Piano') - as the value proposition of Ableton Standard at $400 vs Logic Pro at $200 has been extremely one-sided in Logic's favour for many, many years now.
I do understand, of course; I'm strictly speaking as a Mac user. I honestly have no idea about the DAW landscape for PC's. I am extremely reliant on exporting songs from GarageBand on my iPhone as I create beats on the go quite often - and opening those .garageband files in Logic Pro to seriously hone in on the sounds, keeping the original instruments and MIDI intact. It's an irreplaceable ecosystem for me.
[+] [-] salimmadjd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nfoz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shwoopdiwoop|5 years ago|reply
What truly amazes me though is the stability of the platform. Yes, it's great for home recording and casual use, but the same application is used as a core piece in live performances with huge audiences. There's not a lot of "consumer" software out there that I would trust with that. Ableton Live is certainly one of those.
[+] [-] xriddle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drchopchop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkesper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timdaub|5 years ago|reply
I'm not full-time on this, but I'm trying to build an OSS DAW. Here is a first tiny demo: https://timdaub.github.io/wasm-synth/
I also wrote about it: https://timdaub.github.io/2020/02/19/wasm-synth/
[+] [-] lapinot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deeblering4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fractal_HQ|5 years ago|reply
- LMMS[1]: The go-to cross-platform FOSS DAW solution, with VST support and a healthy community.
- Ardour[2]: Much like LLMS, it's a classic Open Source project that runs cross-platform and is quite fully-featured.
- VCVRack[3]: A brilliant FOSS EuroRack Simulator. It has a built-in package manager with an enormous selection of officially supported and community submitted plugins, complete with VST and Linux support.
- Waveform Free[4]: By Tracktion, Waveform is a robust DAW with VST sandboxing and great built-in FX.
- Audio Tool[5]: A great web-based DAW, featuring online collaboration. Last I checked, there was no VST support.
- Bandlab[6]: Another web-based DAW by the folks behind Cakewalk. While it lacks VST support, it offers online collaboration and straight-forward defaults.
If you like scripting, Reaper[7] offers a personal license for $60 and supports Lua, Python, EEL2/JSFX, and it's own ReaScript[8]. Reaper offers a highly customizable, robust solution for power-users. While the above projects are some of the more complete projects, there are many more scattered around Github. If you're interested in the more niche/experimental ones, let me know and I'll reply with my more comprehensive list.
That being said, I've been an Ableton Live user for over a decade and I recommend it for anyone who wants to invest into a more serious music project. These days, I tend to reach for Studio One[9] by Presonus for more involved projects. While it lacks the focus on live performance, it is more feature-complete DAW than Ableton. Studio One doesn't have the same friction-less workflow that Ableton is famous for, but it's an absolute powerhouse when mastered. It's very well funded and one of the youngest, so Presonus had the opportunity to adopt the best features of more dated solutions like Cubase, Logic, Pro-Tools, and Ableton, while stripping away a lot of the bloat.
[1] https://lmms.io/ [2] https://ardour.org/ [3] https://vcvrack.com/ [4] https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform-free [5] https://www.audiotool.com [6] https://www.bandlab.com/ [7] https://www.reaper.fm [8] https://www.reaper.fm/sdk/reascript/reascript.php [9] https://www.presonus.com/products/studio-one/
[+] [-] snarfy|5 years ago|reply
It's not free but I like to plug renoise whenever I can. It's more of a tracker than a traditional DAW, scriptable in lua. If you are a programmer you might like trackers.
[+] [-] puranjay|5 years ago|reply
https://ardour.org/
[+] [-] Jeff_Brown|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kzrdude|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_m239339|5 years ago|reply
Cakewalk, MPC Beats, Tracktion Waveform,...
Usually Live Lite the free edition (8 tracks) is bundled with $50 MIDI keyboards, and is sufficient to get started with music production, recording and adding a few virtual instruments at least.
[+] [-] pvarangot|5 years ago|reply
It's kind of like a gateway drug, because you can do a lot of stuff on the Lite version but all the "fun" things like all the bundled instruments and effects that let you use it like a modular synth or the scripting and automation goodness come only on the more expensive version.
[+] [-] spindle|5 years ago|reply
Not thread-jacking at all. I ALWAYS want a sub-thread on open-sourced competitors to any product.
[+] [-] varispeed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|5 years ago|reply
This isn't an optimization. https://ardour.org/plugins-in-process.html
And also, the kernel cannot schedule more efficiently than Ableton does, because it doesn't know the data dependencies between plugins.
[+] [-] qppo|5 years ago|reply
Granted you can use a lot of heuristics to figure out simpler solutions since DAW graphs aren't arbitrary DAGs and you can get clever with how you allow them to be constructed, but it's non obvious. That's why parallel performance varies a lot between daw engines.
[+] [-] spacechild1|5 years ago|reply
Speaking as an audio developer, you would certainly not run things in a seperate process to achieve parallelism. Instead you would use a thread pool.
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d883kd8|5 years ago|reply
This is the music I make[1]. The older, more piano-based songs are written in Overtone, and you'll here where they change up to be more textured and electronic sounding when I got into Ableton
1: https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/FCnh
[+] [-] throw_m239339|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blhack|5 years ago|reply
Just curious: do you guys buy the full version? It's so expensive that I've never been able to justify it. I actually have been using the free version that came with a midi controller I bought a few years ago, and even that has been great.
(I'd rather spend the money on hardware synths)
[+] [-] arvinsim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeevans1000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Slow_Hand|5 years ago|reply
I owned a Push 2 for 2 years before I sold it, and in my experience there is very little (if anything) it does that cannot be done with a 1:1 analogue in the software.
[+] [-] pottering|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aldanor|5 years ago|reply
I'm completely baffled at why they can't just accept some standard designs that have become common practice over time and integrate them into the UI.
(I'm aware of the Options.txt hack which is unreliable and I'm not even sure it works with the latest Live 10)
[+] [-] bborud|5 years ago|reply
What’s even more impressive is that they did not start out doing any user research. They made what they wanted and (pardon the pun) it struck a chord. If they had not had the courage to trust their instinct, but had done what so many designers do and focus on satisfying only the needs users can imagine and articulate, I think they would have made yet another Cubase or Protools lookalike. That’s a crowded market and they wouldn’t have made it.
Sure, I understand and agree with your criticism, but there are probably great tools that do what you ask for cleaner and better because those tools are designed around different ideas.
If they can squeeze this in and make it work: great. If they can’t, that’s okay too.
[+] [-] iainctduncan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Slow_Hand|5 years ago|reply
1. Having all instruments and plugins in a horizontally-oriented trough allows quick drag-and-drop rearrangement. So if you want to rearrange their order very quickly you can do it. In Pro Tools it would be a two click operation at best and depending on how your plugins are arranged it could be significantly more than that.
2. It allows you to reach the knobs on their native instruments and plugins without the need to open/close plugin windows first.
3. MIDI mapping becomes much quicker and intuitive when you can simply toggle the MIDI/Keyboard mapping overlay for a given plugin.
4. Their Instrument Rack/Drum Rack/Midi Rack devices are very flexible in their capabilites. Being able to nest plugins within them like macros and then quickly hide or reveal a dozen plugins within a single rack is great for declutterring an otherwise busy interface.
As someone who mixes most of their projects in Ableton, their Rack paradigm allows me to condense a lot of parallel processing into a single instrument/audio channel. This makes for a very clean representation of very complex processing. To do a similar task such as having three channels of parallel processing on a single channel in Pro Tools involves either sending them to as many return channels, or creating duplicates of that channel which all have their own parallel processing chains. This creates way more clutter on the screen.
That said, you CAN still have Ableton's plugins displayed in the manner you prefer. It's a hidden feature that's not documented. Pretty easy to setup, but not discoverable. It's an option that they developed but decided not to include in the final version. Here's a tutorial: sonicbloom.net/en/ableton-live-insider-tips-options-txt-part-1/
[+] [-] S_A_P|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlwaysBCoding|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jermeh|5 years ago|reply
One thing I love about sound design is playing with randomization and effects to make really quirky sounds, and those new devices and features are gonna be a blast for me.
[+] [-] rvense|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galaxyLogic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmicah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viburnum|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deeblering4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokamak-teapot|5 years ago|reply