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Despite significant extras, the core remains intact

I'll admit it: It's only with great trepidation that I install a new version of Live. Is it because I'm afraid the program will crash? No, Live is ultra-stable. Incompatibility issues? Not that either - Live works with pretty much any modern computer that can wake up in the morning. Fear of a learning curve? Not at all; once you've figured out the basics. Live is easy to use.

It's just that Live invented a unique paradigm and stuck to it over the years, and I'd hate to see that get lost in "feature bloat." At the Frankfurt Musik Messe a couple years ago, Gerhard Behles of Ableton mentioned that version 4 was going to include MIDI. I was highly skeptical, and didn't see how they could add MIDI without destroying the program's sleek interface. But Behles was insistent: "Don't worry, we'll add MIDI in the Ableton way." And they did. integrating it as smoothly as they had everything else up to that point.

I'll also admit it took me a while to really "get" Live. It made sense intellectually, but I didn't experience the full impact of it until I hooked up a control surface and was able to make it do my bidding in real time, improvising and composing as I went along.

So this review takes a bit of a different tack. After all, you can download a demo version of the program for yourself; and you don't need me to tell you whether you like it or not. Instead, let's look at the "big picture," and how Live fits into the world of DAWs and hosts. Really, Live 6 is like none of them . . . but in some ways, like all of them. Here's why.

THE TAO OF DUALITY: INTO THE MATRIX

Live's most important aspect is that it offers two different ways to interact with the program. Session view and Arrangement view. You can use one, the other, or switch between the two. Arrangement view is like working with a conventional DAW, as there are tracks for audio and MIDI, visible waveforms, envelopes, automation, etc. Session view is what sets Live apart: This is a matrix of tracks (arranged as...

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