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The Live interface has been tweaked for version 6

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The first thing you notice about Live 6 is the shiny new fascia. Every major Live upgrade brings a slightly tweaked interface, though if you don’t like version 6’s default look, you can choose from an array of other colour schemes (including the ones from all the previous versions’ interfaces).

One excellent visual touch is that almost every numerical readout - be it the cutoff of a filter or the plug-in buffer setting in the Preferences dialog - now sports a coloured bar that also represents its value. This makes it far easier to take in settings at a glance.

Another radical interface change relates to the level faders. These can now be stretched to about three times their original length, making mixing far more accurate; and each one also features a joint peak level/overload indicator. In the Arrangement view, you can now hide various mixing parameters to save on screen space.

Live 6 is far more than a collection of visual tweaks, though. Arguably the most useful improvement resides under the bonnet: the ability to address multiple cores and processors. Previously, Live made a bit of a meal of dealing with plug-ins from a CPU-load standpoint, and could only handle a moderate number of simultaneous effects and instruments.

This has all changed, however – Live 5 projects that any machine would struggle to cope with can now be handled with ease in Live 6 without the need for freezing. We’re talking major boosts in plug-in counts here – around 35-45% in our tests.

Too cool

Which brings us to Deep Freeze. This new system enables more flexible editing of frozen material than ever before. You can now drag frozen clips from the Session view and drop them right into the Arrangement view, or trigger frozen clips from the Session view and record your live arrangement.

Unlike in the previous version, the new arrangement requires no further freezing for it to be played back. Frozen clips can even be moved or copied to new Scenes within the Session view, and you can drag frozen MIDI clips into audio tracks.

If that’s too troublesome, you can use the Flatten function to convert an entire track into audio, automatically stripping away all the original plug-ins. It’s also worth noting that the mechanics of the freezing process have been tweaked since Live 5, so there are now no clicks at loop points.

Elsewhere, fans of Live’s warping technology (ie, everyone) will be pleased to learn that you can now warp multiple clips in the Arrangement view simultaneously, so it’s possible to warp a multitrack project to the same settings in one go.

Also new to the Arrangement view are Tempo Master Clips. These finally endow Live with the ability to handle audio material that contains tempo changes by enabling a clip to dictate Live’s master tempo. For best results, you still need to carefully tweak the Warp Markers in the areas where the tempo changes, but it’s still a huge leap forward that makes creating DJ mixes for radio and compilations much easier.