Live 6 review

Another year, another version of Live, as Ableton's sequencer revolution continues.

This time around, the company has made a good fist of ticking off as many major objections to the program as possible, as well as introducing entirely new features to enhance the overall experience.

The big news in Live 6 is its improved efficiency; it's definitely faster. Ableton's focus was on multiprocessor support, so Live 6 will zip along happily on any new Mac, but older G4 and G5 Macs will also benefit from the speed boost. Certainly, opening Live 5 sets in Live 6 on a G4 PowerBook saw a marked reduction in the CPU meter - enough for a few extra audio tracks and plug-ins before the audio exhibited any glitches. This is good news for every Live user.

Should you need to eke even more mixing mileage out of your Mac, you can take advantage of the new Deep Freeze function. This means that even while deeply frozen (thus freeing up CPU power), clips can still be moved, duplicated and trimmed and mixer automation and envelopes can be edited. The Session view also continues to function pretty much as normal, plus you can drag a frozen Midi clip onto an audio track and have Live load it as a rendered audio sample. Finally, the Flatten command turns any frozen audio or Midi track into a standard clip, unfrozen and with all associated devices removed.

Also new to Live 6 are Racks, a concept reminiscent of Reason's Combinator, whereby a chain of devices can be saved as a single entity. Multiple layers and connections in parallel are possible, whether using instruments or effects, and several Racks can even be nested inside one another. A Rack also has a master control panel with macro knobs that can be assigned to any parameters in the chain, so you can control multiple parameters concurrently.

There are limitations with Racks, but these only really occur when your routings get fiendishly complex. For more routine uses, Racks are brilliant, capturing favourite setups and providing a lot of scope for customisation.

Another long-term user request answered by version 6 is movie import. You can drag-and-drop QuickTime movies onto the interface and add warp markers to align cues. Further, you can snap the video to bars or beats, and view the picture in a floating window or full screen on a second monitor. It's possible to add effects to the movie's audio track, which can be manipulated like any other audio in Live. You can even import multiple videos and cut and paste between them, as well as warping video playback speed to fit Live's project tempo, which is very cool.

The Essential Instrument Collection (EIC) is new to the boxed version of Live 6, dropping 14GB worth of multi-sampled instruments onto your hard disk, including pianos (acoustic and electric), strings, brass, woodwind, guitars and percussion. The EIC extends Live's compositional capabilities and bridges the gap between Live's traditional electronic heartland and its burgeoning acoustic recording and performance side.

Elsewhere, there are new and improved plug-ins, notably EQ Eight, Dynamic Tube and Saturator, while its file management tools help organise and archive projects. Midi Remote Mapping is supported for many control surfaces, and Midi messages can be multi-dimensional - that is, you can control several different devices simultaneously. Ableton has also improved Live's mixer meters, which have gained a decibel scale, a track volume box (to allow for incremental, numerical adjustments) and a peak level indicator. You can fold or hide this extra detail to save screen space on a per-track basis.