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(More customer reviews)I'll apologize in advance for the very lengthy review, but I want to cover all the points that made this program worth the rather hefty cost for me, an amateur music producer.
Music production is only a hobby for me, but as a professional programmer with 22 years experience I feel confident in saying this is one of the most useful, stable pieces of software ever written. Even the Windows version has an Apple Mac-like ease of use, with all the menus and controls logically laid out in a "show me just what I need but make it easy to dig deeper if I wanna" manner.
The different time stretching modes have handled loops from my library that have choked demos of competing products. Ditto for the handling of my favorite soft synths (Cakewalk Rapture and Z3ta) and some legacy MIDI hardware that brought Acid Pro to its knees. My favorite feature is the ability to place what Ableton calls "devices" -- tools like reverb, parametric EQ, panning -- into "chains" that can be saved and recalled and applied to future projects. I've built several "Trance effect" chains for my fave style of music and it saves me hours of trying to recreate a sound I liked earlier.
In the age of shoddy Microsoft operating systems, it's a sad fact that a major feature in any product is that it doesn't constantly lock up the software or the entire computer, but so be it. I've owned Ableton Live for 6 months now and I use it extensively -- it has crashed only 2 times in that time period.
Weak points: Ableton advertises the single-window interface as a feature, but that is a hugely flawed interpretation. Anyone using dual monitors will be staring at one empty screen when running Live. An example of why this is so bad can be seen with the new Spectrum Analyzer device. To make the SA display large enough to be useful, the user is forced to click a mulitude of "resizing arrows" which shrinks other parts of the interface to a size that makes them unreadable. Anyone used to placing their spectrum analyzer on a 2nd monitor while monitoring is "S. O. L."
Fortunately, you CAN toggle an option to allow 3rd party plugins to be placed on a second monitor. I had to drop another $90 for a quality analyzer plugin, but at least I can place it on another monitor where it's large enough to be useful. Truthfully, my Nu-Gen Audio "Visualyzer" plugin leaves every other analyzer I've used in the dust so the Live limitation doesn't hurt me too badly.
The only other annoyance is "screen clutter" when your project has more than a dozen or so tracks. The only solution is to deal with it and scroll constantly back and forth looking for a particular track. Sony Acid Pro blows Live out of the water on this one, allowing users to create folders where they can tuck away groups of tracks such as Percussion, Backing Synths, Leads, etc.
Again my apologies for such a long review. These are things I wanted to know before I decided to drop nearly $500 on a professional DAW package. Hopefully it can help another shopper in the same boat as I was.
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