Recording - June 2014 - 36

&

...where we bring you follow-up articles
with application hints and upgrade news
about gear already reviewed in Recording

Ableton Live 9.1 and Push
The live/studio composition environment
by Mike Metlay
broadens its horizons

We last reviewed Ableton Live in its long-awaited upgrade to version 9 a year
ago (June 2013). This upgrade was a very big deal at the time; it added a ton
of new features, ranging from Session View clip automation and improved browsing to the tighter integration of Max For Live and the introduction of the groundbreaking Push controller (reviewed in that same issue).
The past year has been spent sprucing up Live and squashing bugs, as well as
adding some lovely new features in the user interface and sound engine alike. Live
9.1 (up to rev 9.1.2 as of this writing) purrs along smoothly on both Mac OS X and
Windows in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and adds a fair number of tweaks and
improvements to Push as well, all for free if you're a Live 9 user. Let's take a quick look.
Two views together at long last!
Since the very beginning, Live has been known for its distinctive ability to show
work in progress in two different ways: Arrangement View, a linear distribution of
audio and MIDI clips over time from left to right in somewhat conventional DAW
fashion, and Session View, an arrangement of clips in vertical stacks over mixer
channels, playable alone or in horizontal Scenes. This dual-view perspective is so
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RECORDING June 2014

unique and so integral to Live that it's used (in
stylized form) as the Ableton logo, vertical
Session tracks against horizontal Arrangement
tracks!
These two views have always been two sides
of the same coin, and flipping back and forth
between them is as easy as hitting Tab-but
we've all wished for the ability to have them
both open at once for a clearer view of work in
progress, and with Live 9.1 we now can. Dual
monitor support lets users have Arrangement
and Session views open at once, tweak clip
data in one view while accessing effect parameters in another, or-my personal favorite-
simply move third-party plug-in windows out of
the way of the main Live views without having
to shrink anything down. And along with it, the
near-useless Close Live Set command has been
replaced with Close Window, which lets you
close the currently active window while leaving
the other window open.
Live has led the pack in so many ways, it's
strange to think it's taken this long to add proper dual-monitor support, but now it's there and
very welcome.
Sounds great
A number of tweaks to the audio engine have
improved the sound and performance of Live in
version 9.l. Perhaps the most important, and certainly the one that will affect the most Live users
(i.e. everyone), is one that most users won't ever
notice because it goes on under the hood. Live
has removed the dubious "feature" of being able
to set your buffer size to numbers other than
powers of two (64 samples, 128, 256, etc.).
This can lead to significant performance quirks
on some systems-it caused all sorts of playback
glitches on my Macs until I learned to manually
avoid it-and it won't be missed at all from now
on! Anyone who really valued being able to run
Live with a 117-sample buffer is free to write in
and tell me I'm wrong.
Almost as cool: the SoX Resampler Library,
a set of very high-quality sample-rate conversion algorithms, is now used to do the behindthe-scenes sample rate conversion whenever
audio is exported from Live and changed
from, say, 96 kHz to 44.1 kHz. The result is
significantly better-sounding audio. (Yes, I
checked-my trusty old MacBook still has Live
8.2 on it, and the sound quality difference
between its exports and Live 9.1's is definitely
audible.) And if you're exporting audio files
and select Create Analysis File, Live will save
Warp markers with the audio, so re-importing
gives more reproducible results.
Another good hard Push
Since Push is completely integrated with
Live, additional features and tweaks to how it
works are automatically included with
Recording - June 2014

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