Ableton Live 10 Lite FREE

[Abstract]

Splice is offering the Ableton Live 10 Lite lightweight digital audio workstation for free until December 31st, 2020.

Live Lite 10 is a limited version of Ableton’s popular DAW software.

https://splice.com/daws/38929163-live-10-lite-vst-by-ableton

Edited October 9, 2020 by Abstract

[abacab]

It's limited to 8 tracks and 8 scenes, but is a good way to try out the workflow of Live. https://www.ableton.com/en/products/live-lite/features/

 

 

[abacab]

From what I can see, the main drawback to Live is that it does not have a notation or staff view. ?

[paulo]

Meh.

For me the only thing it really has going for it over anything else is the amount of hardware midi controllers available with proper integration. Cakewalk seems to have really fallen behind the other DAWs in that respect.

[abacab]

3 minutes ago, paulo said:

Meh.

For me the only thing it really has going for it over anything else is the amount of hardware midi controllers available with proper integration. Cakewalk seems to have really fallen behind the other DAWs in that respect.

Yes, but in addition to extensive controller compatibility, I would recommend Live  with it's live looping and sampling abilities, for actual live use over Cakewalk. So for live and studio use, you might want both.

Nothing against Cakewalk, but it was not really designed for live use, although some do use it for that. Cakewalk works best as a recording studio, where Live is weak by comparison to a linear DAW, but it can be used that way.  Just a matter of choosing the best tool for the job.

[rsinger]

18 hours ago, abacab said:

From what I can see, the main drawback to Live is that it does not have a notation or staff view. ?

Considering it's called Live they don't have a way to specify that you want to record n number of bars of audio - you have to spend another $800 for push to do that. If you can live with one scene then you can use MSuperlooper. Zenbeats also doesn't support record n number of bars for audio. Both support it for MIDI.

Edited October 10, 2020 by rsinger

[abacab]

After FL Studio, and Studio One, Live is the # 3 most popular DAW in the world.

Cakewalk made the list, at #8 this year. Guess free counts for something!

According to Music Radar

 

Edited October 10, 2020 by abacab

[paulo]

1 hour ago, abacab said:

Yes, but in addition to extensive controller compatibility, I would recommend Live  with it's live looping and sampling abilities, for actual live use over Cakewalk. So for live and studio use, you might want both.

Nothing against Cakewalk, but it was not really designed for live use, although some do use it for that. Cakewalk works best as a recording studio, where Live is weak by comparison to a linear DAW, but it can be used that way.  Just a matter of choosing the best tool for the job.

Yeah, I was talking in terms of a DAW as a studio. Not sure that pushing buttons to trigger samples and loops is my idea of live either, but each to their own.

[Magic Russ]

I was never able to get over how horrid the interface looked.  I recently got a copy of this included with my ATOM and it did not stay on my machine long.

I know Live has great capabilities but I was never able to mesh with it.

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

I got this from splice and when I logged in to my ableton account to register it, there was a notice

"Good news, a license for the latest version of Live Lite has been added to your account"

For other people like me, getting this in order to get a free upgrade from a previous version (e.g., one that came bundled with hardware) - Check your account first, you may not need to get anything from splice

[kennywtelejazz]

52 minutes ago, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

I got this from splice and when I logged in to my ableton account to register it, there was a notice

"Good news, a license for the latest version of Live Lite has been added to your account"

For other people like me, getting this in order to get a free upgrade from a previous version (e.g., one that came bundled with hardware) - Check your account first, you may not need to get anything from splice

this

I'm glad I read your post . I have Live 9 Intro and after logging in I saw that Ableton had added Live 10 Lite w a serial  number to my account .

thanks ,

Kenny

Edited October 11, 2020 by kennywtelejazz

[Starship Krupa]

4 hours ago, Magic Russ said:

how horrid the interface looked

Is that because of the "flat" look? The default orangey colors? I just installed it and poked around a bit and the UI got a lot prettier when I started adjusting the theme in Preferences.

I'm interested to take it for a spin, and it will be fun to explore some of the further features of things like W.A. Production loop packs where they include Ableton Live templates and sample projects.

Obviously, Ableton Live is a very happening DAW, but it seems like every program has its basic sillinesses. Two that jump right out at me are that it only allows the user to specify one VST2 folder, and no support for WASAPI. Really, Ableton?

On the other hand, I was able to switch the driver mode from MME/DirectX to ASIO with the transport running, without a hiccup. I guess if your program was built with live performance as its basic function, audio engine stability is foremost.

[paulo]

1 hour ago, pwalpwal said:

is it's uninterruptible audio engine

I've probably never managed to be able to look at it for long enough to find that out.

[Brian Walton]

18 hours ago, abacab said:

After FL Studio, and Studio One, Live is the # 3 most popular DAW in the world.

Cakewalk made the list, at #8 this year. Guess free counts for something!

According to Music Radar

 

Actually the list is of the favorite/best DAWs by the readers.   I'm quite certain Live is more popular in terms of usage than Studio One.  

Personally not a fan of the GUI, but it is a good alternate DAW choice since it is effectively designed to work differently.  

[abacab]

9 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

 it only allows the user to specify one VST2 folder

Which can be corrected by placing a shortcut in the VST2 folder that points to an alternate folder.

For example, my main VST2 folder is: "C:\Program Files\VstPlugIns". So I created a shortcut in that folder to point to "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\VstPlugins", where all of my Cakewalk branded VST2 plug-ins reside.

Live scans them all that way, by following the shortcut from the main VST2 folder.

[abacab]

9 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

 and no support for WASAPI. Really, Ableton?

I was surprised by that too, although I have ASIO on my DAW. I had to use ASIO4ALL on my laptop which is RealTek audio only.

I looked on the Ableton site and found this article in the knowledge base: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003149240-ASIO-is-the-recommended-audio-driver-on-Windows

Also found a 3 year old forum thread by the PC users in the Live 10 beta. https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=228482

They speculate that WASAPI may not meet Ableton's standards for latency.

My observation is  that WASAPI is a Windows only driver, where Live is cross platform with Mac, so it may not have as much priority with their devs for testing and QA. I mean, like Live just got VST3 support for the first time in version 10.1 last year, so QA for stability must mean something over there!

Edited October 11, 2020 by abacab

[paulo]

21 hours ago, abacab said:

After FL Studio, and Studio One, Live is the # 3 most popular DAW in the world.

3 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

Actually the list is of the favorite/best DAWs by the readers.   I'm quite certain Live is more popular in terms of usage than Studio One.

Also, popularity is always dependant upon who you ask and not necessarily a reflection of how good something actually is.

[abacab]

Just now, paulo said:

Also, popularity is always dependant upon who you ask and not necessarily a reflection of how good something actually is.

Agreed. But the best thing about DAW popularity is the number of quality tutorials and dedicated hardware controllers that seems to follow the market share...

[Starship Krupa]

15 hours ago, abacab said:

They speculate that WASAPI may not meet Ableton's standards for latency.

I guess that would be as opposed to MME/DirectX, which is supported, or ASIO4ALL, which is suggested in an onscreen tutorial within the program itself.

I see where a couple of people chime in with how poorly WASAPI performs on their systems. Probably as long as there have been standards and commercial software, there have been users who defend their favorite programs' failure to support a technology by saying that the technology is crappy anyway.

Latency with Cakewalk and WASAPI is just fine on my 10-year-old Dell notebook. Given the number of Ableton Live users who use the program on their laptops with no external interface, it seems like a big omission. It won't keep me from using it, it's just a pain and a WTF from an otherwise cool, really well-put-together program.

It's probably something as mundane as their engineering department not wanting to bother with implementing it (although it's not as if there aren't canned libraries and sample code), their QA team not wanting to test it, and their helpdesk not wanting  to support it. The company culture may play favorites with which OS platform gets the attention.

Edited October 12, 2020 by Starship Krupa

[Finnbogi Ragnar Ragnarsson]

Programs using the WASAPI through the "new" Windows 10 Audio Engine, should work just fine, in regards to latency.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/audio/windows-threshold--what-s-new-for-audio

"In Windows 10 work was done to reduce the latency in the OS. Without any driver changes, applications in Windows 10 will experience 4.5-16ms lower latency. In addition, if the driver has been updated to take advantage of the new low latency DDIs that use small buffers to process audio data, then the latency will be reduced even more. If a driver supports 3ms audio buffers, then the roundtrip latency is ~10ms."