When the editors asked me to review Live 5, I was shocked. The reason is that I've been a Live advocate since version 1.0. The first version hit the performing electronic music scene in New York City during the later part of the nineties and made such a dramatic impact that many of the musicians who took part abruptly dumped their current rigs and opted for just a laptop. I personally held on to my beloved MPC-3000 for as long as I could, but once I got my arms around Live's power, the Akai was promptly listed for sale on a newsgroup.

There are many reasons for Live's success throughout the years, but as an avid user, three stand beyond the rest. First, and foremost, Live is the only product that Ableton sells, except for Operator, but that's another story. The product cycle for Live is currently less than a year, which means that Live 6 will hit store shelves sometime this Fall. With the entire organization focused on one product, there is no internal competition, or lack of attention.

The second reason is that Live just happens to be a killer app. You can use it as a stand-alone application for constructing a full-on track, as a DJ rig, or as a Rewire component to your favorite Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

Utilizing Clip envelopes in Ableton's Live 5

The third reason is the shear amount of intelligent and persuasive "evangelists" that comprise Live's user base. This group isn't just using the product, they're preaching. Ableton is also very much in touch with their customers and solicit feedback individually and via their vibrant forums, which I suggest you visit regularly.

The shear depth of Ableton's Live makes it prohibitive to go through all its attributes in this review, so we'll just touch on some of the major enhancements. If you're new to Live or would like to go further down the rabbit hole, I would recommend buying Live Power! By Dave Hill Jr. and Chad Carrier, and reviewing the forums on Ableton's excellent website. This combination will have you up to speed in no time. Track Freeze is a major enhancement in this version of Live. For users with older computers, or who like to rock many clips and effects, this one feature is a Godsend.

Live 5's Arrangement View with Simpler

Ableton's Live does have some limitations, so lets briefly discuss those before I get too gushy. Ableton loves to refer to Live as a DAW, but I've never been able to honestly refer to it as such. Without audio editing and more elaborate MIDI implementation, such as Groove Quantization, I think it's a stretch. Proponents of the program will claim that the strength of Live's clip envelopes make up for the lack of sample editing, but that's the one step forward, two steps back approach. The metering in Live is also quite poor. There are only small visual indicators and no vertical db scale to utilize for marking specific levels. Live cannot run thrid party plug-ins when acting as a ReWire slave which is a shame to all the electronic musicians who love using Live as a killer drum machine. Live 5's claim of MP3 file support is not quite accurate. Live 5 can only integrate a MP3 file by importing it and then converting it to a WAV. So all the DJs who want to save valuable disk space on their laptops end up having two different file formats of the same file on their computer. A DJ is much better off just importing a quality WAV or AIFF file instead of having Live convert the lossy MP3 format.

There's plenty of exciting new action in Live 5 including automatic plug-in delay compensation, a browser search feature, improved track tempo evaluation, track freeze, and a new time-stretch mode dubbed Complex which was developed for tempo changes during long DJ mixes. The plug-in compensation works great especially when incorporating complicated delays that some of the plug-ins can create. The browser search feature is just OK and is an area where Ableton's developers can spend some more time. The file browser area could also use a better visual paradigm; a solution to the problem of file folders that don't get masked by the session window would be a welcome. Live's tempo evaluation algorithm has also been greatly improved. Now when you load a track Live does a significantly better job of figuring out the tempo. Usually just a slight manual tweak to the warp marker on the first beat of the 16th bar will make the track's downbeats line up perfectly.

Live 5's basic MIDI implementation holds the program back in many ways

The Clip view in Live 5 has also been nicely upgraded, especially for DJs. Now you can "needle drop" by clinking on any warp marker in the top bar when your icon turns into a little speaker. Live automatically drops in on beat for quick syncing. Very sweet. The new clip file format incorporates the audio/MIDI in a clip and all of the specific settings, effects parameters and envelope information.

For users who like to reuse specific chains of instruments and effects there's Device Groups. This welcome addition allows you to save serial runs of parameters for later use. Speaking of long, CPU cycle intense chains, Track Freeze will split Live users into two groups: "It's about time" and "This is so great." Freeze creates an audio track of your instruments/sample and plug-ins freeing up valuable CPU bandwidth for other tasks. For us at Futuremusic, we'll just jump up and down and yell "Hooray!"

Many of Live's users either love the built in effects or don't like them at all. For me, I think they're OK, nothing groundbreaking, but useful nevertheless. Fortunately, Live 5 supports almost every effects plug-in and virtual instrument technology available today including ReWire, VST and AU.

Ableton Live 5 is available for $499 from music retailers worldwide or via the Ableton website.

The Future: Although Live 5 kicks ass on almost every front, there are a couple of things that can be improved. For one, the metering in Live is only useful for indicating peaks. Precise leveling to specific decibels is just not possible. The MIDI features are very basic and could be significantly improved. In fact, I'm very surprised that Ableton has not included any advanced mathematical MIDI sequencing (a la the Latronic Notron --Ed.) in any version to date. With their German pedigree, I feel that Ableton could almost reinvent MIDI sequencing in Live. Additionally, Live is still without Groove Quantization, a rudimentary feature that even the free MIDI sequencers offered online possess. Last, but not least, I'd love to see some sort of Audio Editing in the next version of Live. Having to constantly jump to Sound Forge or Peak definitely hampers my work-flow within the program.

Web Bonus! Want to get more out of Live 5? Then check out: Plogue's Bidule to enhance Live's feature set.

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