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by zarmin 1471 days ago
They can't even add ARA2 when every other major DAW has had it for years. Something is deeply wrong with Ableton, either they have trash product managers, SWE, or the 20+ year old codebase is too fragile. For example, why can't I have more than 7 collection folders?
3 comments

Live 11 is becoming more of a cpu hog to my iMac Pro with each M1 update. It crashes the most often of all my DAW software. That said while I could go back to Logic or Cubase I still get 10x more music done with live vs the others. I remember about 10-12 years ago live version 7 or 8 was way behind schedule so much so that the CEO/Owner made a statement about it. This is all from memory though so some details may be wrong. I say that to say that is suspect that the code base is probably more fragile than the others.
I've been using Live for 15 years. The workflow is better in some ways—or at least it's extremely familiar—but I recently forced myself to learn Reaper. My mind is painstakingly slow to adjust, but Reaper's features make Ableton feel outrageously archaic. If I'm being honest with myself, I'll need another year or two to match my productivity with Live, but the bandaid had to be ripped off at some point, and I'm glad I did.
Note that Bitwig does not have ARA2 support either. Bitwig was developed by some folks who left Ableton to push in directions that Ableton did not want to go.

So ... consider the possibility that the fundamental data models in both Live and Bitwig make it hard to support ARA2, in an inverse of the way that Live (and later Bitwig) had clip launching for 16 years before any other DAW.

Yes, I think that is very likely the case. That worries me as a customer, especially as more ARA-based plugins are released.
Or ARA is not a priority for their market?

They have rewritten their codebase back 10-15 years ago (or at least refactored it heavily) and have made videos about it.

Given enough users, people will ask for any feature. The question was whether it was a priority for most.
Were you not able to make an inference from the post count of that thread?
That it can inspire a flame war/big discussion?