Update: Thanks to "The Bridge", you can now record your Serato performances into Live 8, and play back Ableton sets on your decks or CDJs. Click here to find out more.
Live 8 is the latest incarnation of the hugely popular music package from Ableton, a whole host of new features and improvements make this version, by far, the best to date.
Ableton Live 8 Info
In its relatively short lifetime (when compared with other music packages), Ableton Live's user base has risen to make it practically ubiquitous within the electronic music scene.
Live initially rose to popularity with its excellently designed easy to use interface and indispensable tools such as realtime time-stretching, which made it ideal for live performers who needed quick and precise control of their music.
Since then it has not only flourished into a fully fledged music production package making it ideal for producing from the ground up, but also refining the features which made it so popular and ground breaking in the first place.
Some of the new features in Ableton Live 8
New groove engine
Groove patterns can add life and swing to straight sequences. Live 8's new groove engine lets you apply groove patterns in real time, extract grooves from audio or MIDI sources, quantize audio and MIDI in real time. It also comes with a new groove library.
Looper
A much-requested feature, the Ableton Looper effect gives you classic sound-on-sound looping without the limitations of a hardware device. Looper is set up for remote operation, so you can record, overdub, undo and more without touching the computer.
New effects
Live 8 includes five powerful new effects: Vocoder, Multiband Dynamics, Overdrive, Limiter and Frequency Shifter. These effects cover all the well-known aspects of these devices, but really shine due to some innovative features and enhancements from the Ableton labs.
New warping engine
Live 8 introduces a new, more direct way of working with warping and some important Warp Mode enhancements. You can now warp audio events by adjusting the events themselves on the timeline. Beats Mode has been updated, and there's a completely new Complex Warp Mode. Plus you can slice audio files to MIDI tracks based on transients.
Workflow enhancements
Version 8 makes Live easier with a number of most-wanted enhancements and some deceptively simple detail work including real-time crossfades in the Arrangement View, enhanced MIDI editing, group tracks, a screen magnifier and more.
Novation Integration
The Novation SL MKII Range is now fully integrated with Ableton for seamless control of the software from your keyboard. Any parameter can be assigned quickly and changed from the hardware. Check out the video below to see just what you can do. Click here for more info on Novation controllers and Automap.
