Designed for musicians, Ableton Live 8 brings you a unique creative
workflow, a host of amazing-sounding virtual instruments, and its most
powerful set of performance tools yet — bridging the gap between studio
and stage. With Ableton Live 8, you'll have all the standard digital
audio workstation tools you need for professionally recording and
editing audio. Yet, you'll also be ready for innovative sound-on-sound
looping with the new Looper tool, as well as creative audio and beat
warping, and extremely flexible groove-creation and modification. Take
the "right-brained" approach to making music, with Ableton Live 8.
An audio environment for the creative mind
While Ableton Live 8 certainly offers all of the tools you need to make
music in a traditional "linear" way, the gurus at Ableton developed
this software suite to allow a uniquely creative approach to song
creation. Use Ableton Live 8 to piece together song ideas and song
structures by dragging around sections and loops in "Session View"
(discussed further below). Or, use Live 8's Session View to enhance
your live performances by assigning out massive MIDI controls — so you
can record loops, overdub, perform in a massive synth part, and develop
songs, all on the fly. Offering an inspiring workflow for everyone from
DJs to solo musicians to top-level groove producers, Ableton Live 8 is
a complete solution for brainstorming, creating, composing, building,
growing, and performing your songs.
Session View lets you grow songs in a new way
Use Ableton Live 8's Session View to develop your songs — either in the
creative environment of your studio or out in front of the audience. In
this mode, you can quickly lay out all of each instrument's "changes"
of a song — from up to down, instead of left to right. Each part is
essentially a loop, and you can trigger different scenes to play
different combinations of each part, trying out new song structures or
parts just by dragging and dropping. Ableton Live 8 appeals to tons of
electronic artists for just this feature — you can record audio into
Live 8, leave it running as a loop, record in audio to another loop,
and creatively mash, solo parts, or play synth parts over the top of
everything. For songwriters, Ableton Live 8's Session View also offers
a unique way to restructure songs and try out different
verse/chorus/verse/bridge lengths and transitions, without messing up
the audio and MIDI you've recorded and sequenced in your "linear"
session. And, once you've landed on a structure you like, you can
easily record it into your Ableton Live 8 regular timeline, just by
triggering the transitions.
Easily MIDI-map nearly everything control in Ableton Live 8
Nearly every control in Ableton Live 8 is MIDI-mappable, so you can
pair it with any MIDI controller for a serious amount of flexibility.
Use your MIDI controller's knobs and sliders to adjust volumes,
panning, effects, or to trigger scenes and virtual instruments. By
assigning out your custom settings in Ableton Live 8, you can work — or
perform — in any way you want.
New intelligent Looper for building massive one-man-band songs
Ableton Live 8 now includes an intelligent sound-on-sound Looper
feature, which you can easily control remotely with a regular
footswitch. What makes Live 8's Looper so cool is that it will read the
tempo from the length of the first loop you record, and it
automatically syncs up — that way, it eliminates timing issues and lets
you record without the click. Use Live 8's Looper to loop endlessly —
Multiple Looper sync lets you run as many Loopers as you want, without
synchronization headaches. Plus, you can drag and drop a loop from Live
8's Looper right into a clip slot in Session View to make a clip. When
you want it back in Looper, all you have to do is drag it back over.
Loaded with tools for beat and groove creation
If you're into grooving, Ableton Live 8 is even more exciting than the
previously groundbreaking versions of Live. In addition to a massive
Drum Rack for dragging and dropping samples, slicing them, and laying
them out onto your MIDI controller, Live 8 now offers an enhanced
groove engine. You can influence the timing and velocity/volume of
audio and MIDI to give life and swing to straight patterns. Use the
Live 8 groove engine to extract groove patterns from any audio or MIDI
source — and you can build your own library of grooves from your
favorite tracks, which you can apply to other tracks later. Ableton
Live 8's groove engine also lets you quantize audio and MIDI in real
time — or randomize it for a more "human" feel.
Packed with effects, including a new vocoder
Ableton Live 8 comes to you with tons of effects for developing your
sound and producing it until it's ready to be published on your website
or on CD. Along with creative choruses, delays, phasers, and other
must-have effects, Live 8 is now packed with five new powerful effects,
developed with a bit of extra "Ableton shine." The included Vocoder
lets you get that famous "singing robot" effect, and offers you a ton
of control for sound design. Beyond that, a new Multiband Dynamics
effect lets you visualize what's going on with your audio, so you can
process it more effectively. Other new effects in Ableton Live 8
include a stompbox-modeling Overdrive effect, the brick-wall Limiter,
and the sci-fi-sounding Frequency Shifter.
Features:
- Designed from the ground up for the creative studio or performing musician
- Unique Session View breaks out of "linear" music composition allows for a new, fluid approach to songwriting
- Nearly every control is MIDI-mappable, for a flexible workflow — onstage or in the studio
- Intelligent Looper makes it easy to build and record one-man-band songs
- Tons of tools to develop beats and apply grooves
- Includes a comprehensive selection of built-in audio effects,
including a host of creative delays, filters, distortions, studio
compressors, and EQs
- Features Elastic Audio, for tweaking the timing of your music as it plays
- Lets you mix, match, and add effects without ever stopping the music
- Powerful creative and performing environment for DJs and mash-up artists
- VST and AU effects and instrument support; automatic plug-in delay compensation
- REX file support and native sliced audio file creation
- Video import and export for scoring to picture or warping picture to music
- Includes built-in step-by-step tutorials
System Requirements:
- Mac: Any G4 or faster (Intel Mac recommended), 512 MB RAM (1GB
recommended), Mac OS X 10.3.9 (10.4 or later recommended), QuickTime
6.5 or higher, DVD-ROM drive
- Windows: 1.5 GHz CPU or faster, 512 MB RAM (1GB recommended),
Windows XP or Windows Vista, Windows compatible sound card (ASIO driver
support recommended), QuickTime 6.5 or higher, DVD-ROM drive