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The Live interface has been tweaked for version 6

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Gratuitous plugs

Live 6 features three new plug-ins, the most enticing of which is a rather large, tasty distortion plug-in called Dynamic Tube. This offers three noticeably different characters of saturation and distortion, and it sounds the business (though not exactly analogue!). It’s versatile, too – you can throw it over pretty much anything in your mix.

Then there’s EQ Eight, which is far more than a rehash of EQ Four. Yes, it offers all of the same functionality plus, of course, four more bands, but it also features independent left/right controls and a mid/side mode (almost nobody will understand what this is for, but we can all sleep happier knowing that it’s in there).

Finally, there’s the Note Length MIDI plug-in. This might sound like it should be rather dull, but it’s actually very cool when placed in front of your soft synths in a device chain.

Mention of device chains brings us to another of Live 6’s key new features: the Device Rack system. This enables limitless grouping of plug-in effects and instruments, MIDI effects and even other Device Racks (think Reason’s Combinator and you’ll have a good idea of how Device Racks work).

You can layer multiple chains within one Rack and even set up keyzones to control how each chain is triggered. Keeping everything in order are eight freely (and multi-target) assignable front panel knobs.

The final major addition is movie playback support. Any Live users who are involved in post-production will relish the prospect of being able to edit and warp audio to match on-screen video, and this feature makes it much easier to sample sections from movie soundtracks.

It’s still basic, though – video playback is only available in the Arrangement view (though movies are available as audio clips in the Session view) and though you can warp video clips, you can’t export the resulting video.

This being the case, it’s not advisable to use this feature unless you want your video and sound to be out of sync! Still, we’re guessing Live’s video functionality will improve in time – what’s here now offers a tantalising glimpse of what VJs can expect in the future.

DJ dilemmas

So far so good, then, but Live 6 isn’t perfect. We’ve already mentioned the new Tempo Master Clips, but unfortunately, these are no good for DJs who need to be able to play back tracks that contain tempo changes in the Session view. Ableton say that to implement this feature would require a lot of work (they had to prioritise heavily when putting Live 6’s feature set together) but the fact remains that this is a big limitation if you’re a DJ. Another oversight from a DJ’s perspective is that there’s still no facility to view the waveforms of more than one clip at a time in the Session view. This means that there’s no way of spotting imminent breakdowns and drops. Could we not view waveforms in the window that currently shows us ‘time remaining’?