MusicRadar

Live 5 comes with more bundled sounds

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• Review

Since Live was launched back in 2002, its ascent to the upper echelons of the music software premier league has been little short of meteoric. In a marketplace that's well-served by increasingly powerful apps with many years of development behind them, Ableton have managed to turn a potentially niche product into a favourite of producers, DJs and live musicians alike.

The reason for this is quite clear: in terms of technology, ergonomics, workflow and on-stage usability, Live stands alone, doing things that no other software can do in ways that are genuinely inspirational. But, as with any application, there's always room for improvement, and with v5, Ableton have set their sights on improving Live's functionality as both a DJ/ remixer's tool and a professional DAW.

Live by name…

One of Live's main selling points has always been its relevance to DJs. Its ability to fluidly bend audio in the realms of triggering, tempo and beat placement make it a great digital accompaniment to – or replacement for – decks and mixers. In fact, a number of very big DJs (most notably Sasha) use it as the centrepiece of their live performances. However, actually preparing tracks for such outings can involve an awful lot of work, particularly if they're outside the four-to-the-floor idiom. Live's Elastic Audio engine relies on the accurate placement of Warp Markers throughout each clip, and while short samples can be successfully analysed by Live's built-in warping system, for longer clips (ie, complete tracks), this has previously been a rather laborious manual process.

Indeed, we know of several name DJs who actually hire production teams to warp up their choons for them. Thankfully, those days are gone. Live 5 introduces the brand new Auto-Warp algorithm, designed to automatically and perfectly Warp absolutely anything you throw at it. There's also the new Complex Warp Mode – an amazing sounding (and convincingly heavy-duty in terms of system resources) frequency-domain algorithm for timestretching full pieces of music. Oh, and while we're on the subject of complete tracks, Live can now import MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg FLAC and FLAC files, although it does have to decode them into WAV files to do it. This takes up a fair old bit of temporary disk space but happens entirely behind the scenes. Auto-Warp kicks in automatically when you drag an audio file over a certain length into Live.

In earlier versions of the software, out-of-time loops or full tracks had to be manually warped one or two bars at a time; Auto-Warp reads the material in a number of different ways in order to find its tempo (and fluctuations thereof) and thus place Markers on the right beats. Because of this, it takes a while for the algorithm to analyse an audio file for Auto-Warping the first time it's imported, and during this time, playback of the file is off limits. It's a process that only has to be done once per file, though – a small Live reference file is created alongside the main one. Happily, the program can also prepare files en masse automatically: this is done on a folder-by-folder basis via the browser's right-click menu. Wait a minute – did we say right-click menu!? Yup, Live at last now has contextual right-click menus in various areas, both duplicating commands from the main menus and giving exclusive access to certain functions.