Ableton Announces Live - Audio Sequencer for Jamming
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Arranger window |
February 6, 2001Ableton presents Live, a disk based audio sequencer software for live jamming using a Mac or PC.
Not only can you record, arrange and edit audio with Live, you can jam with audio; Live's "session-view" contains a pool of audio clips which can be "launched" from the computer keyboard or via MIDI (with or without quantization). You can create your own pool from loops, one-shot sounds or entire pieces. The size of the pool is restricted only by the size of your harddisk. There's enough room for the entire content of a record flight-case.
Live's Time-Warping-Engine stretches and shrinks audio clips as they're being read from the hard disk. If you want to, you can have the clips automatically synchronized to your session-tempo or to an external sync-source. The pitch remains unaltered and can be adjusted independently. Audio becomes as flexible as MIDI.
Every sound is processed with its own unrestrained chain of effects. Live comes with a battery of exquisite effect devices, suitable for subtle and drastic manipulations. The Live effects are controlled by intuitive 2-D displays, which are ideal for live articulation. Live's mixer and all of it's effect parameters can be remotely controlled by MIDI-control-devices.
During the jam, you just play around with your material without thinking about the beginning or end of the piece, developing the piece as you go. Everything you do gets recorded: every "launched" clip and every turn of every knob.
Live's session's protocol is graphically displayed in an arranger-view and can be edited, down to the smallest detail, including temporal transitions of mixer parameters and of effect parameters with breakpoint envelopes. You can fine-tune the detail until the piece is finished. There's also unlimited "undo-history", for those "the last version was better" cases.
All of Live's tracks can be routed individually to the outputs of an arbitrary ASIO device; the same is true for the inputs. MME/DirectX (PC) and SoundManager (Mac) are both supported. VST plug-ins can also be configured as effect devices in Live. Live slaves to any MIDI clock, MIDI time-code-source or serves as sync-master. ReWire II support guarantees flawless integration with other sequencer software. For more information, visit their web site at www.ableton.com. | 
