Ableton Live 8 Gets The Groove

Hot on the heels of Digidesign, who recently released Pro Tools version 8, Ableton have now announced Live 8 (and Suite 8). The official release isn’t due until Q2, but what can we expect from this latest iteration of the gig-friendly DAW?

Live 8 Loops And Grooves

Ableton Live 8 now allows you to extract grooves from audio or MIDI and save them as groove templates (a similar principle to Reason’s ReGroove). You can now also apply grooves to your music non-destructively, in real-time.

The new Looper module allows you to record a loop and have that form the basis of your entire project – just capture a section of audio, and the song’s tempo will snap to that of the recorded loop. You can also have several Loopers running at once for true repetition madness.

Live And Let Live

Other juicy features of Live 8 include an improved Warp Drive with drag-and-drop warp markers, new overdrive, limiter and frequency shifter effects, real-time arrangement crossfading, and a Vocoder module. If you’re into MAX/MSP, then the Max for Live add-on should make your patch creation and integration process that much easier.

Suite Deal Gets Sweeter

Ableton are offering some incentives to buy version 7 now, with a discounted upgrade to Live 8 or a free upgrade to Live Suite 8 when it is released.

As a further sweetener, if you buy Live 7 now you get Operator and Drum Machines for free – with the upgrade to Live 8 subsequently costing only 49 euro as a download. If you’re considering going Live, then this might be a good time to get the bandwagon rolling…