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Now if ONLY they added things all other DAWs have - say, a mixer where you could see all your attached plugins at once? Try mixing a 100-channel project with a

Now if ONLY they added things all other DAWs have - say, a mixer where you could see all your attached plugins at once? Try mixing a 100-channel project with a few plugins on most tracks where you have to click on the track first to see which plugins it has. I'm completely baffled at why they can't just accept some standard designs that have become common practice over time and integrate them into the UI. (I'm aware of the Options.txt hack which is unreliable and I'm not even sure it works with the latest Live 10)

bborud 6y ago
I’m actually quite impressed with how Ableton came up with a UI that didn’t exist about 20 years ago and then stuck to it without trying to be all things to all people. The hardest thing to do is to say no. What’s even more impressive is that they did not start out doing any user research. They made what they wanted and (pardon the pun) it struck a chord. If they had not had the courage to trust their instinct, but had done what so many designers do and focus on satisfying only the needs users can imagine and articulate, I think they would have made yet another Cubase or Protools lookalike. That’s a crowded market and they wouldn’t have made it. Sure, I understand and agree with your criticism, but there are probably great tools that do what you ask for cleaner and better because those tools are designed around different ideas. If they can squeeze this in and make it work: great. If they can’t, that’s okay too.
- aldanor 6y ago
  That's all understandable and I agree that they had the courage to go the 'other direction' and succeeded in doing so. And that's part of what makes Live special and what makes it fun to use, which I do on daily basis. But for professional use, you do end up with a hundred or a few hundred track lanes in your projects, and mixing and tweaking the whole thing becomes an unavoidable disastrous chore. If I understand this correctly, they planned on introducing it in Live 8 (hence a hidden flag in Options.txt which sort-of enables a preview of this feature but is extremely buggy), but it never fully worked out because they also introduced Racks with nested tree-like flow of plugins, which doesn't play well with a conventional matrix-like mixer view. That being said, I believe most pro users would be happy with a simplified solution like "if you fork a chain in a rack, its branches won't be shown in the mixer", which would cover the 95% of other simple use cases like, seeing where your compressors are at a glance without having to click on each track a hundred times... There's many such things - like proper multi-screen support (e.g. with 3+ screens), which, hypothetically, could also couple well with a separate-window mixer view where they could introduce chain branching and all that (and become the first DAW to do that!). For pro use, there's lots of features like this that may sound boring but end up hampering your workflow a lot. It may not be as fun-sounding as 'yet another cool phaser bitcrusher spectral distortion plugin' but the reality is, professional users that they supposedly aim at do require core functionality that's been missing since the start.
Slow_Hand 6y ago
I believe it may have to do with the fact that Ableton is a performance tool first and foremost. It would follow that all design decisions stem from that requirement. Yes it is a full-featured DAW like Logic or Pro Tools, but Ableton differentiate themselves by supporting that paradigm and that leads them to configurations that are unconventional for non-performance-oriented DAWs: 1. Having all instruments and plugins in a horizontally-oriented trough allows quick drag-and-drop rearrangement. So if you want to rearrange their order very quickly you can do it. In Pro Tools it would be a two click operation at best and depending on how your plugins are arranged it could be significantly more than that. 2. It allows you to reach the knobs on their native instruments and plugins without the need to open/close plugin windows first. 3. MIDI mapping becomes much quicker and intuitive when you can simply toggle the MIDI/Keyboard mapping overlay for a given plugin. 4. Their Instrument Rack/Drum Rack/Midi Rack devices are very flexible in their capabilites. Being able to nest plugins within them like macros and then quickly hide or reveal a dozen plugins within a single rack is great for declutterring an otherwise busy interface. As someone who mixes most of their projects in Ableton, their Rack paradigm allows me to condense a lot of parallel processing into a single instrument/audio channel. This makes for a very clean representation of very complex processing. To do a similar task such as having three channels of parallel processing on a single channel in Pro Tools involves either sending them to as many return channels, or creating duplicates of that channel which all have their own parallel processing chains. This creates way more clutter on the screen. That said, you CAN still have Ableton's plugins displayed in the manner you prefer. It's a hidden feature that's not documented. Pretty easy to setup, but not discoverable. It's an option that they developed but decided not to include in the final version. Here's a tutorial: sonicbloom.net/en/ableton-live-insider-tips-options-txt-part-1/
- aldanor 6y ago
  > That said, you CAN still have Ableton's plugins displayed in the manner you prefer. It's a hidden feature that's not documented. Pretty easy to setup, but not discoverable. It's an option that they developed but decided not to include in the final version. Here's a tutorial: sonicbloom.net/en/ableton-live-insider-tips-options-txt-part-1/ I've specifically noted above, expecting this reply: "I'm aware of the Options.txt hack which is unreliable and I'm not even sure it works with the latest Live 10". It does NOT work properly and it's unsupported/unmaintained. You get misaligned circles, up to 4 per channel, instead of plugin names, because redraw logic is broken. > Having all instruments and plugins in a horizontally-oriented trough allows quick drag-and-drop rearrangement. That's true in most DAWs. E.g. in Logic, you just drag plugins around, either in the channel strip which would be always open for a given channel, but ALSO in the mixer view. Try dragging plugins across channels in Live and see how that goes for you. > It allows you to reach the knobs on their native instruments and plugins without the need to open/close plugin windows firs Same in Bitwig. In Logic, you can't but instead you can e.g. see all (native) EQ curves for all channels simultaneously in the mixer view and access it without having to select the track first. > MIDI mapping becomes much quicker and intuitive when you can simply toggle the MIDI/Keyboard mapping overlay for a given plugin. Same in Bitwig. In Logic it's a few clicks instead of one but the idea is the same. > Being able to nest plugins within them like macros and then quickly hide or reveal a dozen plugins within a single rack is great for declutterring an otherwise busy interface. True. But that comes at a price of those chains and effects being even LESS discoverable when it comes to mixing. Since now a particular plugin may be buried deep two layers down in a rack of racks.
iainctduncan 6y ago
I love Ableton, but for mixdowns, you're right, the UI paradigm is awful. I use Ableton, Max, and Reaper to have the right tool for the job. For mixing, Reaper is the bomb. I know of a lot of pros who prefer it over everything, regardless of cost. It's just the most flexible mixing tool out there.

bborud 6y ago

I’m actually quite impressed with how Ableton came up with a UI that didn’t exist about 20 years ago and then stuck to it without trying to be all things to all people. The hardest thing to do is to say no. What’s even more impressive is that they did not start out doing any user research. They made what they wanted and (pardon the pun) it struck a chord. If they had not had the courage to trust their instinct, but had done what so many designers do and focus on satisfying only the needs users can imagine and articulate, I think they would have made yet another Cubase or Protools lookalike. That’s a crowded market and they wouldn’t have made it. Sure, I understand and agree with your criticism, but there are probably great tools that do what you ask for cleaner and better because those tools are designed around different ideas. If they can squeeze this in and make it work: great. If they can’t, that’s okay too.

aldanor 6y ago
That's all understandable and I agree that they had the courage to go the 'other direction' and succeeded in doing so. And that's part of what makes Live special and what makes it fun to use, which I do on daily basis. But for professional use, you do end up with a hundred or a few hundred track lanes in your projects, and mixing and tweaking the whole thing becomes an unavoidable disastrous chore. If I understand this correctly, they planned on introducing it in Live 8 (hence a hidden flag in Options.txt which sort-of enables a preview of this feature but is extremely buggy), but it never fully worked out because they also introduced Racks with nested tree-like flow of plugins, which doesn't play well with a conventional matrix-like mixer view. That being said, I believe most pro users would be happy with a simplified solution like "if you fork a chain in a rack, its branches won't be shown in the mixer", which would cover the 95% of other simple use cases like, seeing where your compressors are at a glance without having to click on each track a hundred times... There's many such things - like proper multi-screen support (e.g. with 3+ screens), which, hypothetically, could also couple well with a separate-window mixer view where they could introduce chain branching and all that (and become the first DAW to do that!). For pro use, there's lots of features like this that may sound boring but end up hampering your workflow a lot. It may not be as fun-sounding as 'yet another cool phaser bitcrusher spectral distortion plugin' but the reality is, professional users that they supposedly aim at do require core functionality that's been missing since the start.

Slow_Hand 6y ago

I believe it may have to do with the fact that Ableton is a performance tool first and foremost. It would follow that all design decisions stem from that requirement. Yes it is a full-featured DAW like Logic or Pro Tools, but Ableton differentiate themselves by supporting that paradigm and that leads them to configurations that are unconventional for non-performance-oriented DAWs: 1. Having all instruments and plugins in a horizontally-oriented trough allows quick drag-and-drop rearrangement. So if you want to rearrange their order very quickly you can do it. In Pro Tools it would be a two click operation at best and depending on how your plugins are arranged it could be significantly more than that. 2. It allows you to reach the knobs on their native instruments and plugins without the need to open/close plugin windows first. 3. MIDI mapping becomes much quicker and intuitive when you can simply toggle the MIDI/Keyboard mapping overlay for a given plugin. 4. Their Instrument Rack/Drum Rack/Midi Rack devices are very flexible in their capabilites. Being able to nest plugins within them like macros and then quickly hide or reveal a dozen plugins within a single rack is great for declutterring an otherwise busy interface. As someone who mixes most of their projects in Ableton, their Rack paradigm allows me to condense a lot of parallel processing into a single instrument/audio channel. This makes for a very clean representation of very complex processing. To do a similar task such as having three channels of parallel processing on a single channel in Pro Tools involves either sending them to as many return channels, or creating duplicates of that channel which all have their own parallel processing chains. This creates way more clutter on the screen. That said, you CAN still have Ableton's plugins displayed in the manner you prefer. It's a hidden feature that's not documented. Pretty easy to setup, but not discoverable. It's an option that they developed but decided not to include in the final version. Here's a tutorial: sonicbloom.net/en/ableton-live-insider-tips-options-txt-part-1/

aldanor 6y ago
> That said, you CAN still have Ableton's plugins displayed in the manner you prefer. It's a hidden feature that's not documented. Pretty easy to setup, but not discoverable. It's an option that they developed but decided not to include in the final version. Here's a tutorial: sonicbloom.net/en/ableton-live-insider-tips-options-txt-part-1/ I've specifically noted above, expecting this reply: "I'm aware of the Options.txt hack which is unreliable and I'm not even sure it works with the latest Live 10". It does NOT work properly and it's unsupported/unmaintained. You get misaligned circles, up to 4 per channel, instead of plugin names, because redraw logic is broken. > Having all instruments and plugins in a horizontally-oriented trough allows quick drag-and-drop rearrangement. That's true in most DAWs. E.g. in Logic, you just drag plugins around, either in the channel strip which would be always open for a given channel, but ALSO in the mixer view. Try dragging plugins across channels in Live and see how that goes for you. > It allows you to reach the knobs on their native instruments and plugins without the need to open/close plugin windows firs Same in Bitwig. In Logic, you can't but instead you can e.g. see all (native) EQ curves for all channels simultaneously in the mixer view and access it without having to select the track first. > MIDI mapping becomes much quicker and intuitive when you can simply toggle the MIDI/Keyboard mapping overlay for a given plugin. Same in Bitwig. In Logic it's a few clicks instead of one but the idea is the same. > Being able to nest plugins within them like macros and then quickly hide or reveal a dozen plugins within a single rack is great for declutterring an otherwise busy interface. True. But that comes at a price of those chains and effects being even LESS discoverable when it comes to mixing. Since now a particular plugin may be buried deep two layers down in a rack of racks.

iainctduncan 6y ago

I love Ableton, but for mixdowns, you're right, the UI paradigm is awful. I use Ableton, Max, and Reaper to have the right tool for the job. For mixing, Reaper is the bomb. I know of a lot of pros who prefer it over everything, regardless of cost. It's just the most flexible mixing tool out there.