Okay, so it's here - Ableton Live 6 has been announced, along with a new look for the Ableton site. In addition, we have a really exciting new integrated instrument called Sampler (as opposed to the existing Simpler... get it?). Let's take a look-see - a detailed preview follows the break. -->more-->
Live 6
Okay, so here's the meat and potatoes. Live has a preview movie you can check out, but we'll go over some of the detail here.
Multicore/Multiprocessor Support - This is a feature that Live has needed for quite some time now - all of the old Altivec harping that used to go on pales in comparison to the demand for multiprocessor support. With Macs now shipping with the dual core processors, and the rumor mill pointing towards multiple dual core chips in the MacPro, it makes you wonder what new heights of performance we'll see out of Live on these newest machines.
Movie Import - This has been requested for quite a while as well, so it's good to finally get it. I always wondered how to implement editing to picture within live, and it looks like they've nailed it. Just drag a movie file into a new track in the Arrangement, where you'll see a waveform view of any existing audio track the movie might have. You can then open a movie window to view the video (which you can watch full screen on a second monitor) and you can trim, edit, and use warp markers to fit music to picture within the Arrangement. You can also treat the movie's audio just like any other audio track.
Racks - Ableton has expanded on the Device Groups on v5 with the Racks concept. In fact, the best description of Racks appears to be a "MetaGroup", allowing parallel device chains, where "chains" equates to the serial nature of the Device Group.
MIDI Key and Velocity splits can be programmed in - imaging layering 2 Simplers and an Operator without having to muck about with a lot of MIDI routing on various tracks, and doing some fancy velocity switching on top of that. You can also nest racks - I'm already feeling my multicore processor drag under the weight! :)
Final fun feature - you get 8 Rack Controls, which remind me of the Morph Groups on the Nord. Each one of these knobs can be assigned to multiple parameters of devices within your Rack, while being able to control the specific range and polarity of each parameter controlled.
New Devices - EQ Four is gone, to be replaced by EQ 8 - the major change here is obvious, right? Apparently, it's got a little more up it's sleeve than just more bands of EQ - you can control each stereo channel individually, and do M/S conversions as well. You can morph continuously from dry to wet with a global scaling control, and every one of the bands can be set between shelf/cut/bell curves.
Dynamic Tube is a tube distortion device, which will be an improvement over the Saturator, but what I can't wait to play with is the included Envelope Section.
The Saturator device looks to take a major step forward towards being an incredibly complex Waveshaping device, with a specific waveshaping mode included in this version, as well as "a true analog saturation curve" - I'll have to hear that to believe it. :) They've added a second stage to grant us some limiting capability if we go overboard with the waveshaping.
A new Note Length MIDI device gives us the capability to modulate just that - imagine tying one of these behind the Arpreggiator or Random devices. It also has a trigger mode to allow for fancy post-release behavuours. That will certainly come in handy in all of our new Rack-based instruments won't they, children?
Operator gets more algorithms, and some new 24db/oct filter modes - nothing too drastic, but nice.
Oh, then there is Sampler - we won't get into that just yet.
Deep Freeze - Live 5 gave us Freeze, where we could offload DSP cycles by doing a seamless render to 32-bit audio. 6 is going to expand on the freeze concept - whereas our old frozen tracks just sat there immobile while we worked on other things, we will now be able to copy/past and mixer automation/envelope edits on our frozen materials. We'll be able to consolidate and do Session operations on frozen tracks now as well, but the really neat thing is to be able to transform a frozen midi track into an audio track (essentially a render operation) into either an existing audio track or by issuing a single "flatten" command. My Racks will thank you.
Project Management - Live 6 takes a big step in the direction of Logic Pro by enhancing it's "Save as Self Contained" command. You can now create project folders much like Logic's, where multiple Sets can be collected with any of the objects and files that they depend on. A huge boon to some of us will be the ability to pack a project with lossless compression - my HD and DVD budget thank you! They also mention the ability to do global searching for missing files and unused file purges.
Other Improvements - Let's see - I'll really love Live 6's adaptive controller mapping when enough of you punters buy my album to allow me to get a new ReMOTE 25 SL. :) You'll now be able to assign a single external controller to multiple destinations - that's a pretty big deal, and a feature that's been on the request list for a good long while. Even bigger is that you can scale/invert and specify ranges. Better takeover and pickup modes, good for the aforementioned ReMOTE.
You can now warp multiple tracks at once, something that gets one line in their list of improvements, but will go a very long way for anyone wanting to use Live as their primary DAW. They also mention an "optional large mixer view with numeric peak level readouts". Oh, and now we'll be able to sequence our Live devices within our master DAW when we're running Live as a ReWire slave. That's a much bigger deal than it sounds for many of us.
You can now swap sounds freely from the browser into any audio clip, or sample within Impulse, Simpler or Sampler. They've given us a crop/trim function so we don't have to go to Peak or Audacity to do simple edits to our sounds.
Big deal stuff here is that they've improved the merging capability, so we can take multiple sets from our recording sessions and pull them into a set to use on stage.
We can also render multiple tracks out with a single render command, something that would save me a WHOLE lot of time, as I currently render my tracks out individually to pull into Logic. Now, that may change once I get going on an Intel dual-core processor. :)
Bringing up the rear are some nice little enhancements to the browser - you can show filetype/size/modification date - hope you can sort by them, too. You can also add bookmarks to the browsers, something that will help me out as I always feel like I have about 3 too few browser default locations.
Ok, so wrap it up, Jeremy - Let's see... anything else? Oh, yeah. Buy the boxed version and you get a huge sample library from the folks that used to be Sonic Implants and are now known as SONiVOX. Lots of good stuff here - and as someone who has done download only the past couple of revisions might just pony up the extra duckets. On the other hand, it looks like they're going to let us cheapskates buy the library separately.
It's a good thing, becuase I'm going to need the cash in order to get my hands on SAMPLER, the new instrument I'm going to devote a separate post to. In the meantime, just writing this post about 6 has increased my excitement - whereas it might not be as groundbreaking an update as 4 was with the addition of MIDI (or 5 with MP3), there's still a lot of exciting new stuff in here. If you look at just the headlines, it may seem underwhelming, but once you start thinking about the possibilities of Racks and some of the fine-tuning they're doing, it feels like a great progression.
Disappointments? I REALLY wish that they would add AAC support, but I'm not TOO worried about that. The Sampler price tag sorta hits me where it hurts as well...