Placeholder Post: Live 9

I mentioned before I was going to do a review of Live 9, I have the program but I haven't got the time to dig into it. It comes with alot of new features, the least important of which is the off-shade grey interface. Looks slick:



The real "selling point" features are: audio to MIDI for both percussive and melodic material, improved EQ, a new compressor which is supposed to emulate the compressor unit from "a classic british console" Translated from marketing speak: it's a copy of the SSL bus compressor. Plus the Push controller, which promises to break the computer musician from the tyranny of the mouse and MIDI keyboard. This is something I'm not really into at the moment, but I have a friend who might be able to comment briefly.

All these are great and useful things, but what I'm most interested in is the addition of Max 4 Live to the Suite version of the program. Suite on it's own is great, although it was tad expensive up until version 8. But it's worth every penny, seeing as it's the flagship version of the program, fleshed out with enough sounds and instruments to stand on it's own with other DAWs. Adding Max support makes it a full package, in my opinion something was missing from Suite 8. Before Suite 9, adding the price of Max to the program would cost you ~$950 CAD in total, wheras now you get the whole deal for $750. Not bad.

I've been wanting to get my hands on Max ever since I read that Autechre were into it. Now that I have it, and it's integrated into my favorite DAW it's sortof overwhelming. Not only do I have a major "4 years in the making" update to wrap my head around, but the object-oriented aspect of Max as well. What I'd like the next phase of this blog to be is to log my progress learning Max, and sharing anything I learn about using Live 9. Take care, see you in the next few weeks... I can't promise when, the Matrix might take me under.