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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, the notion that Ableton is just for dance music is very far from the truth. Sometimes they don't help themselves with their marketing, but the software suits all kinds of music making from dance to classical to ..whatever.

Also FWIW, it's without doubt in my mind the best DAW by a long stretch. For me there are many reasons for this but the killer one is that the time and effort from idea to laid track is miniscule.

When you're dealing with initial ideas, they're extremely fragile. I've had so many of these slip into the abyss in the face of crap software. Ableton - once you've learnt the basics - has you getting stuff down within seconds of booting. That's immensely valuable IMO.

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A good hardware controller makes it even better. They make the Push, which is great if you have that kind of money, but I bought a Novation Launchpad Pro for half the price and it transformed how I use Live.

> Also FWIW, it's without doubt in my mind the best DAW by a long stretch

You did try to add some caveats to this, but I think it's really, really important to stress that there is no "best DAW". Workflows for audio production vary dramatically, and while Live is a very, very cool program, there are plenty of workflows for which it be inappropriate at worst, and not the best choice at best.

Fortunately, these days there's a DAW for everyone, and it sounds as if you've found yours.

I'll take that!

The quality of the scale limiting is beyond any DAW I've used. That's great for me as someone who can't seem to memorize scales. I've heard FL Studio has a good scale limiting feature, but I can't figure it out. Ableton's is 1-3 clicks and, to me, intuitive. I wish they would steal Reaper's ability to load scales from files. Live comes with a lot, but sometimes I want to experiment.

Bitwig doesn't have it at all and they broke the paint scale->nudge to -1 workaround (which still works in Live) the last time I tried the demo.

That's really cool that Live has it built in to the piano roll now. I've been using Bitwig with the plugin Scaler 2 for this purpose.

By scale limiting you mean showing you the scales? It's a setting in the piano roll which highlights the notes in the scale you select. Alternatively showing you which scale you've placed notes in if you've made something yourself.

I mean scale limiting as in restricting to a scale. The highlighting was all I could find in FL Studio. Reaper has it in the form of scale snapping. Ableton starts with highlighting, but can fold a clip down to only show notes in the scale. Bitwig doesn't have it at all and, last I checked, broke the only workaround.

The contempt shown for people who can't remember scales on DAW forums suggests most developers don't support this either out of fear of their vocal users or because they agree. Even highlighting brings the knives out.

Ok I see what you mean. I haven't really frequented any DAW communities though. The hostility to people not already good sounds like a shame. I certainly don't know scales by heart like that either. So even highlighting helps.

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