ABLETON ANNOUNCES LIVE 8, SUITE 8 AND NEW INITIATIVES

My music composition software of choice is [[Ableton Live]] and soon to come [[Ableton Live 8]], very excited. Here’s a snippet of the press release from their website.

To read the whole thing click here

Software ships second Quarter 2009

Berlin, Germany (January 15, 2009) – Ableton is excited to announce the agenda for 2009: Ableton Live 8, Ableton Suite 8, new instruments and three completely new product initiatives.

Live 8 and Suite 8 enhance the Ableton vision of creative, real-time digital music with a wealth of new techniques, effects and most-wanted workflow improvements. These include a new groove engine, revamped warping techniques, live looping, five new effects (including the Ableton Vocoder), crossfades in the Arrangement View, group tracks and a reworked MIDI editor. Ableton Suite 8 includes all that plus a massive, inspired sound library and all the instruments a musician could hope for, including a wide range of synths, a sampler, electric and acoustic drums (new: Latin percussion), mallets (new: Collision), numerous sampled instruments and a new, even-mightier Operator.

New in Ableton Live 8:

• New groove engine: new groove library, extract grooves from audio or MIDI, real time groove quantize
• New warping engine: warp audio events by adjusting the events on the timeline, updated Beats Warp Mode, new Complex Warp Mode, slice audio files to MIDI tracks based on transients
• Looper: classic sound-on-sound looping without the limitations of a hardware device. Record, overdub, undo and more without touching the computer. “First loop sync,” simple loop management
• New effects: Vocoder, Multiband Dynamics, Overdrive, Limiter and Frequency Shifter
• Workflow enhancements: including real-time crossfades in the Arrangement View, enhanced MIDI editing, group tracks, multiple track selection, a screen magnifier and more

New in Ableton Suite 8:

• World-class sound library: completely new sound library with real-world “Sound Objects,” presets, grooves, templates and, above all, over 1600 beautiful sounds
• Collision and Corpus: a unique physical-modeling instrument for authentic mallet sounds and creative percussion. Includes Corpus, a separate effect that reproduces Collision’s resonator section
• Latin Percussion: a collection of acoustic percussion instruments from the worlds of Brazilian, Afro-Cuban and African music plus a wide selection of clips and grooves for authentic usage
• Operator, Ableton’s renowned do-it-all synthesizer, has been given a major overhaul. New filter types, more modulation routing options and additive wavetable synthesis with drawable partials make Operator more powerful and flexible than ever.

Plus these existing Ableton instruments: Sampler, Electric, Tension, Analog, Drum Machines, Session Drums* and the Essential Instrument Collection 2*.