[TomSwirly]

Live is such a terrible program. Oh, it's great if you want to do 4/4 dance music centered around samples but for all other purposes it is incredibly painful.

As a classic example, I play a midi wind instrument which sends notes and breath control and pitch bend. If you use "scale time" on the midi track, it moves the notes and leads the breath control and pitch bend where it was, silently breaking the track. This is true also of pitch bend, modulation, and volume controls.

I contacted them well over 10 years ago with a polite and careful bug report. Their original response was, "That is what it is supposed to do". I said "But all other sequencers stretch all the MIDI, not just the notes! And it breaks my tracks. Isn't there some way I can just stretch all the midi?"

"No, why would you want to do this?"

"Because I want to stretch existing MIDI tracks to match other tracks."

"You should record with a metronome so that the tracks are already in sync."

"But I already have these tracks. And also, when I am composing, I prefer to just play without a metronome, and then select the parts I like."

"You're just being difficult."

And they refused to respond after that. Years went by, and every year I saw some other sucker complaining about the same thing.

Well over a decade later, they finally implemented it - _except_ it's only for three MPE controllers, so it doesn't deal with breath control, classic pitch bend the way it has been sent by every single controlled before around 2021, modulation, or volume.

I have dozens of similar bugs.

Now I use Reaper. What a difference!

[coldtea]

>Live is such a terrible program. Oh, it's great if you want to do 4/4 dance music centered around samples but for all other purposes it is incredibly painful.

That's just not true. It's used all the time for experimental, decidedly not "4/4 dance music", for soundtrack work, and for many other things, including tracking regular rock and other such bands.

>As a classic example, I play a midi wind instrument which sends notes and breath control and pitch bend. If you use "scale time" on the midi track, it moves the notes and leads the breath control and pitch bend where it was, silently breaking the track. This is true also of pitch bend, modulation, and volume controls.

Well, all DAWs have similar quirks. Some don't have microtuning (Live does) so you can't play Indian or Arabic maqam scales. Others don't have MPE (Live does), or can't sync live drums to the DAW in real time so synths/arps etc match the tempo (Live does), and so on...

[pottering]

MIDI Stretch stretches all linked envelopes, not only the three MPE controllers, if you select TIME not notes, as Live differentiates those types of selection.

The status bar in the bottom will say if you have "Time Selection" (Start, End, Length) or "Note Selection" (Time, Pitch, Velocity, Probablity).

Arrangement has a similar distinction between selecting time or Clips.

[mkr-hn]

Live is first and foremost a tool for making electronic music in the same way Cubase is for making live band stuff. You can use one for the other, but you'll fight against the design goals that underly them. I would love Cubase's expression maps for handling keyswitches in Live for those rare times I use orchestral stuff, but I know I'll need to spend money on the top Max device for it if I want to get serious about sampled instruments. And I don't, because 99% of the time I'm making ridiculous sounds in Massive/Massive X. Live is all about the painless automation and clip launching. Automation is central to electronic music. Clips are fun to goof around in, but also let musicians cut up their songs for dynamic playing during actual live sets.

[mtalantikite]

> Oh, it's great if you want to do 4/4 dance music centered around samples but for all other purposes it is incredibly painful.

A good friend of mine uses Live heavily for creating music -- definitely not 4/4 dance music: https://album.link/i/1627338395 . He's mainly using acoustic recordings as samples though, so it sounds like your specific use case works better in other DAWs. I've never played with Reaper, sounds interesting!

[bambax]

Interesting. I use Reaper and love it, but sometimes I feel "ashamed" of not using Live like everyone else. Of course when listening to a finished track nobody cares what it was made with, but for collaboration the choice of Reaper seems a little limiting. Yet it's so powerful.

That said, there must be reasons why Live is sooo popular...?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Essentially by default, Live can take any material and automatically ensure that it matches the tempo (and key) that you're working in. Clip launching is a very powerful way to play around with musical ideas, even if it is not necessarily the best way to produce finished pieces of music (though it can be). Reaper doesn't have this workflow (at least, not builtin). It is this "I can goof around with almost any material and it almost always sound good, or at least interesting" element that I believe made Live so popular.

[bambax]

Ah ok. The way you're describing it reminds me a lot of Acid Pro, which went from Sonic Foundry to Sony to Magix where it seems to have disappeared. It's still available apparently, but I have yet to meet anyone who uses it (or has even heard of it!)

There was a time when it was all the rage. How things change.

[TOGoS]

> That said, there must be reasons why Live is sooo popular...?

I've been using Live since 2015. My take on what it's got going for it is that it has a relatively streamlined interface, and is fairly opinionated on a particular way of setting things up, which makes learning it quicker. Instruments and effects for each track across the bottom. Make a bunch of tracks whose output by default feed into groups, which you can treat as busses. You can override the routing, but the default is easy to understand and straightforward. The stock devices cover 95% of what you need to do, generally "sound good" out of the box, and Max For Live provides a way to make custom devices that seamlessly integrate into the DAW.

Also the clip launching stuff and integration with the Push is neat. I suppose more DAWs have that capability now, but in 2015, Live made it easy.

If I were to pick a new DAW I'd probably go with Bitwig. Live is starting to feel like legacy software to me. Max For Live is too low-level to do polyphonic instruments easily, but the visual node-graph approach is harder for me than writing code would be. It sometimes hangs for 30 seconds at a time while I'm trying to flesh out some ideas, and find myself annoyedly sitting there trying not to forget what I was trying to do while Live gets its shit together.

[an_aparallel]

i think a part if Live's popularity stems from its image as "the DAW for serious producers". Might have something to do with it being pushed at universities as well/or tech colleges which teach audio. So - it's somewhat engrained as the DAW that's used for electronic production. And Protools as what's used for audio recording. I think it's most intuitive to use as a DJ mixing tool. I've never more easily created mixes with blends than i have in Live. This is where it started i guess (as Henke/Monolakes live set software as a MaxMSP patch) - so it makes sense it's most intuitive there (in my opinion)

[coldtea]

>That said, there must be reasons why Live is sooo popular...?

the clip launching workflow makes it a great file for live sets, improvised electronic (or any other kind of music based on blocks), and so on

very streamlined for easy focus - many DAWs suffer from windows upon windows, in Live it's all (including built-in fx and instruments) in a single, non-MDI window, and all tools, fx, instruments, windows use the same widgets and concepts (not the case in e.g. Logic or Cubase)

automatic (and good) sync-to-tempo for audio, including several manual manipulation options (pitch/tempo/combo/etc)

opinionated fx and built-in instruments tuned to electronic and experimental music (including a full-on built-in version of Max, one of the most popular visual programming environments for building your own fx, instruments, audio/midi processing tools, and so on)