We’ve had access to Live 12 for a while, and now the news of its release is official. Here’s what’s new and our early take!
> We don’t get quite as excited about DAW updates as we used to – most DAWs are so mature now that they already have pretty much everything you could ask for. But when Ableton does an update it always adds a decent number of extras. That’s because an Ableton Live update is not as common as it once was (it’s been around three years since the last one) so the Berlin-based developers have time to add a lot with each revision. This is very much true of the new v12 of the DAW. There’s a great deal more that has been added here, spanning both exciting instruments, effects and sleek workflow additions. With just the addition of the new Meld synth and the Roar effect, Live 12 stakes a claim for introducing two of our inevitable future favourites. But more on those later, that’s just the start of it…
While the version 11 bump was significant, it was more focused on the sheer number of additions, without there being many notable headline grabbers. Live 12 has, from what we can see so far, even more additions. We’ve been working through them over the last few weeks while the software was still in beta, so – let us be clear – this is not a full review as such, but our early findings on this robust revision, and some in-depth first impressions.
23 years in the making…
Yes, Ableton Live first appeared over two decades ago, and over those years the software has not really changed radically in terms of form or function. So 12 is not, of course, a complete redesign as Ableton doesn’t really do big design changes. The company knows its core users are pretty happy with the overall formula staying put. That foundational cliporiented idea has been with us since 2001 when Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf took version 1 of the software to the NAMM show. While there, Hans Zimmer was so impressed by the software’s real-time audio timestretching features that he helped spread the word – and the rest is history.
Live’s initial flurry of updates meant that version 4 landed by 2004
