Re: Great round-up article comparing DAWs

[Tom Swirly <tom@swirly.com>]

I just want to add one point to this, and that's to say that after several years of using Live, I deeply regret my decision to choose this as my primary sequencer.  It's clearly not aimed at anyone who actually writes songs, but worse, there is a level of arrogance to the company where they simply refuse to admit the existence even very serious bugs that have been repeatedly reported over years.

The classic example I point out is "stretching MIDI".  If you take a MIDI sequence and stretch it in time in Live, it only moves the notes - all other MIDI events (aftertouch, controllers, pitch bend, etc) stay exactly where they were.

Since I play a WX-7, it means that I simply can't stretch any of my MIDI sequences without completely breaking them.  

If you bring this up to the company, their response is that this is not a bug, this is what it's supposed to do.  When you ask them to explain under what circumstances anyone would use this behavior of moving only notes and nothing else, they refuse to answer.  

If you ask them how you can do things like "record someone's performance without a metronome and then adjust it to fit time" they tell you to use a metronome, and then accuse you of being deliberately difficult when you say you don't want to play with a metronome;  when you point out that this is a common request from paying customers, they refuse to answer.  

And if you point out that Opcode Vision did this over 20 years ago and all other sequencers do exactly this, they, you guessed it, refuse to answer.

I feel trapped into it by Max For Live, but the instability (I have literally crashed the M4L/Live combination over a thousand times) and buggy nature of that program has meant that I really haven't gotten much that I can actually use to reliably work in a live performance.

Don't make the mistake I did - pick anything other than Ableton Live.