Nuff, said. Hopefully it comes together soon. Practicing a lot, though.
Max for Live beginnings
I finally figured out how to put a few of the Max for Live API abstractions together. It would be great to make it so automation of one parameter on one device can easily control that of another parameter within Live. Kind of make it like a modular DAW. I have a few ideas on how this can be extended, but I would love to hear from other Max for Livers on what they think would be great additions.
My Favourite Things About Ableton
So I think I may have people thinking that I’m anti-Ableton. I know that every DAW has its drawbacks and I am not going to stop using a great piece of software because of shortcomings. But it is the responsibility of the user to let the programmers know what they want and will or won’t stand for in their product. May have come off a little harsh, so here’s what I love about Ableton…(btw, I have a lot more beefs to bring up, I just think it’s time I did some bigging up before knocking down).
1) Forums – The fact that its forum users are so loyal and will jump down your throat as soon as you say anything bad about them, even though you might have a valid point. That is something great.
But more seriously…
You can search your whole computer for samples, other projects and Ableton has done a great job at integrating the system folders at your finger tips.
By combining Max/MSP/Jitter and Ableton Live, they have reached a new frontier of Live presentation and even for module-based digital processing that is not available anywhere else. Bravo.
4) Resampling –

There’s often that weird sound in music sequencing where you don’t know how you got it but you want to exploit it. The resampling capabilities in Ableton make this so easy to capture.
5) Easy consolidation –
So great to be able to click and drag your MIDI and Audio into your other projects so that you can combine those old beats and loops into something new and exciting…Uh oh, but why can’t you drag your Return tracks in also?? C’mon, that should definitely be an option.
Sticking It – Reclaiming Live 7 Instruments
So I am pretty upset about how these guys did this to loyal Ableton users. Luckily I kept my Ableton 7 files in tact so I can transfer them over. But they don’t make it easy…I’m pretty choked. The least they could do would be to make it easy to transfer over the instruments after they deleted them from the list. But no…We have to do it ourselves, the hard way.
Here are the steps.
1) Download the Ableton 7 Library .zip here and unzip it
2) Find where your Ableton 8 Library is located in your computer browser (on my mac laptop, mine was in mitchbederman/Library/Application Support/Ableton
3) Drop your Ableton 7 Library folder in your 8 Library
4) Locate the instruments presets you want from Ableton 7 and copy them into your 8 library
5) Go into your Ableton session, click on your live 7 instrument presets. There will be a status bar update at the bottom of your Live session that says samples are missing.
6) There will be a bar on the right that opens asking you where to with three YES/NO toggle buttons. Set the bottom two to NO and keep the first one on YES.
7) Set the folder to search for the missing samples as the location where you just dropped your Ableton 7 Library inside your Ableton 8 Library.
Activate the search.
9) SAVE THE INSTRUMENT!! Or else the samples will go missing again. (I chose to overwrite the instruments with the same name)
10) Repeat steps 5-9 for each instrument.
There are WAY fewer Impulse and Simpler instruments in Live 8 than Live 7. The instrument racks contain much more. To update my Live 7 instruments into 8, it took me a little over an hour. I believe it’s worth it.









Reverb and Primetime and Flying Faders, oh my
If you ever get a chance to use one of these, I highly recommend it. Especially the Quantec. Gives a reason why outboard gear is still relevant.