You can now purchase Ableton Live 12 Suite on a rent-to-own plan.
Ableton has announced that Live 12 Suite, the top-tier version of its flagship DAW, is now available on a rent-to-own plan, placing the software within reach of music-makers on a limited budget.
Live 12 Suite is priced at £539/€599/$749. The rent-to-own plan spreads the cost of the DAW over 24 monthly payments of £22.46/€24.96/$31.21, with no extra charges, and the remaining balance can be paid off at any time. (An educational license for Live 12 Suite, which is 50% cheaper, can also be paid off in 12 monthly payments.)
Ableton’s rent-to-own plan can be paused at any time with no penalty, and users will be able to access the software until the end of the current billing cycle. You can then pick up where you left off and resume the plan at any time. Users have the option of extending their rent-to-own plan to cover the cost of an upgrade when a new version of Live is released.
You won’t need to be online constantly to use Live with a rent-to-own plan, but Live will periodically verify that the plan is active. Users can use Live offline for up to 3 days between verification checks – if you stay offline longer than that, saving and exporting will be disabled until you verify.
Currently, Ableton’s rent-to-own plan is only available for Live 12 Suite. The DAW is available in three editions (Intro, Standard and Suite) with Suite at the top end, bundled with 20 software instruments, 58 audio effects and 71GB of presets, samples and loops.
Rent-to-own plans are a popular alternative to the increasingly prevalent subscription model. Unlike a subscription, once all payments in the plan have been made, a customer owns their Live 12 license in full, in perpetuity.
To purchase Ableton Live 12 Suite on a rent-to-own plan, head to Ableton online store.
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s unveiling of Live 12.3, Ableton has released updates for its Note iOS app and Move hardware. While there are a few differences between these two updates, they share one key headline feature – adding full, unabridged access to Live’s stock synth Drift.
Now, for the first time, Note and Move users have full access to one of Live’s synths complete with every parameter available in the DAW version and the ability to craft patches from an initialised state.
Despite their visual differences, Move and Note share a lot of fundamental similarities. Note, which launched in 2022, brings a stripped-back version of the Live workflow to iOS devices, allowing users to play and sequence MIDI clips as well as sample and sequence audio, plus manipulate sounds with a limited selection of Live’s stock effects.
Move is a standalone hardware device designed as an on-the-go sketchpad companion to Live, although under-the-hood it essentially runs a variation on the Note app.
Both formats control instruments and effects via a bank of eight parameter controls, which are adjusted via the touchscreen in the case of Note and using a bank of eight touch-sensitive rotaries on the Move hardware.
In each case, in order to control Drift, these controls can cycle through multiple banks of parameters for adjusting the synth’s oscillators, filters and modulation tools, along with a top-level bank of macros.
The key difference between the rollout of Drift across the two platforms is that, while it comes to Move as a free firmware update, access to the full version of Drift in Note requires an in-app purchase, although this is fairly reasonably priced at $6.99.
In either case, having access to the full range of Drift parameters is an excellent addition. As Live users will likely already know, Drift is a fantastic-sounding, wonderfully versatile analogue-style synth capable of creating both faux-vintage tones and modern timbres. Particularly when combined with Move’s expressive pads, it can create some highly dynamic and vibrant synth patches.
The Note update is out now, and also adds an assortment of bug fixes and minor workflow refinements (all of which are free, and don’t require the purchase of Drift).
Move’s latest firmware update, v1.7, is available today via public beta. Along with the upgrade to Drift, the update also introduces the ability to adjust the brightness of the Move hardware, and adds a pair of new acoustic drum racks.
The update follows hot on the heels of other recent Move updates. Version 1.5, which arrived earlier this summer, significantly improved the device’s MIDI capabilities and added much-requested sample-slicing capabilities. V1.6, which left the beta stage just yesterday, introduced the ability to reverse samples in Drum Racks.
The Note app is available from Apple’s App Store priced at $/£6.99. Move is available now priced at $499 also on Amazon site. Find out more about Note on the Ableton site, and join the Move public beta here.
Live’s 12.2 update is only a few months old, but Ableton is already launching its next free ‘point’ release, Live 12.3 – which enters public beta today.
The next free update to Live 12.3 brings major new ways to work with samples, along with new expressive features for Push 3, plus a new audio effect for Move, Note and Live Lite.
Scanning the release notes for 12.3, it quickly becomes clear why Ableton is keen to turn this update around quickly. Its two most significant new features both see Ableton addressing areas where Live was notably a step behind some of its key competitors.
The first big addition is AI-powered stem separation. Unless you have been living under a rock, it’s highly likely you’ve encountered similar functionality over the past few years.
While the ability to divide fully mixed tracks into component parts has been around for a while via dedicated tools such as Hit’n’Mix’s RipX, the technology has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few years, and is increasingly becoming integrated into mainstream music making software.
Real time stem mixing is now standard in most DJ software, and stem separation is already a feature embedded into production tools including Serato Sample, FL Studio and Logic Pro.
Live’s version is provided by Music AI and it can be accessed in Live’s audio clips, either in Session or Arrangement view, or within the browser. The separation works in the now-standard manner of dividing the audio file into stems labelled drums, vocals, bass and other, which appear as their own individual audio clips that can be treated like any other audio within Live.
More immediately useful for a lot of Live users is Splice integration within the DAW’s browser. For the ever-growing amount of producers who regularly use Splice’s library of sounds as part of their production process, the drag-and-drop functionality is likely to be a major time-saver. Additionally, the ‘search with sound’ feature promises to help find sounds within Splice’s online library based on the rhythms and harmonies already present in your project.
And there’s more…
As is often the case with these ‘point’ updates, however, some of the most exciting features are those lurking beyond the headlines.
Following the refresh of Auto Filter in Live 12.2, another of the DAW’s workhorse devices gets an overhaul here. This time it’s the turn of Auto Pan, which now becomes Auto Pan-Tremolo. The addition of tremolo functionality is essentially acknowledging the way in which many users were making use of the device anyway – by aligning the phase of Auto Pan’s left and right channels, it was already possible to use it to duck the volume of audio and create tremolo-style effects.
As well as introducing the dedicated tremolo mode, the new Auto Pan-Tremolo adds some really handy new features, including the ability to fade in the attack of the pan/tremolo effect as well as have it respond dynamically to the level of incoming audio.
It’s not quite an upgrade on the level of Auto Filter’s radical overhaul, but it does make one of the DAW’s most useful tools significantly more versatile.
Another significant new feature, somewhat hidden at the bottom of the press release, is the ability to set A and B states for every instrument and effect in Live. This is potentially incredibly useful, as it allows the users to experiment with two radically different sets of settings for any device and flip between them with a click of a button of the keyboard shortcut ‘p’.
There are improvements to the way in which Live bounces audio as well. With 12.3 the DAW introduces a new Bounce Group functionality, which lets users bounce an entire group of tracks down to a new audio file with all its processing applied – which will prove handy for any users turning their projects into stems for mixing or live performance.
There are some cool new Packs and Max for Live tools added as part of the update too. In the new Generators Pack, users of Live Standard and Suite get access to a new percussive MIDI tool named Patterns, along with Sting, an acid bassline generator based on the popular Max device of the same name.
The excellent Sequencers Pack – full of great tools for generative creativity – adds the ability to create reproducible arrangements. The recently-added Expressive Chords gets updated too, with tools to make it easier to customise and transpose its bank of chord shapes.
Push it
There’s also a lot of great news for Push 3 users in the update. For one thing, the big headline features – stem separation, Patterns, Sting, group bounce – can all be accessed from Push in both tethered and standalone modes.
Push also gets some excellent upgrades all to itself though. The first of these is the ability to use class compliant audio interfaces with Push 3 in standalone mode. This means it’s now possible to vastly expand the amount of ins and outs available beyond those featured on the hardware itself. This could already be done via the use of the ADAT connection, but hooking up a standard audio interface is undeniably an easier and more convenient option.
The latest firmware update also adds a new XY control mode where Push’s expressive pad grid can be used to control effects Kaos Pad-style as well as apply punch-in effects by pushing an individual pad. There are also upgrades to Push’s sequencing workflow, allowing for touch sensitive control over velocity levels while step sequencing, as well as introducing a new Rhythm Generator layout for sequencing percussive patterns with Drum Racks.
Both Live 12.3 and the accompanying Push update are out in public beta today.
To see the full list of updates, head to the Live 12.3 beta release notes*.
Head to the Ableton site to read more and join the beta program.
