Ableton Live Developers at Work [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Another, absolutely brilliant move by Ableton was to host a MOOC, https://www.coursera.org/course/abletonlive
Not just for companies, but for cultural organisations and public bodies too.
For example, the Royal Opera House in London has an active and popular Youtube channel. They are a publicly-funded organisation but opera and ballet are still seen as somewhat elitist and expensive. Their Youtube channel gives them an opportunity to showcase their productions and behind-the-scenes footage. The videos are well-made and informative. And it undoubtedly helps bolster their reputation.
https://www.youtube.com/user/RoyalOperaHouse/videos
Another example: a well-known supermarket retailer in the UK (Waitrose) who also have a very polished Youtube channel (of mostly recipes)
https://www.youtube.com/user/Waitrose/videos
I think audiences are savy enough to know when a video has an element of promotion in it. What turns them off is if it feels like a self-congratulatory puff piece. Or if it feels too scripted and fake.
> Being awesome? Being too humble? Pushing for that last 5% of perfection when I should call it a night? It is really a toss up, I have so many.
I'm sorry but I believe you're mistaken. I googled and could not find any evidence that Ableton had anything to do with the Coursera MOOC whatsoever.
Most of what I did find suggests that it's run by (and for) Berklee College of Music. (So our point about MOOCs as marketing could still be valid, as Berklee has a big online program, most of which is not free.)
Then a video of them 'jamming' (a suspiciously well-produced jam, but I'll let that one go) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgiL7lsIATA
Then the genius part. The third video had the band describing their philosophy to making music, and to life. One commenter wrote "This changes everything" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58BHEAleNHs
I can see that there would probably be concerns with conflicts of interest, etc. But if done right (ie. keeping the marketing branch separate but connected) I think it would be a great match.
My reasoning? Companies don't just want commercials anymore. They want their story told. Who are better equipped to research and tell a comprehensive story than journalists?
The danger is letting companies influence sections that are believed to be objective and honest. One example of this is Michael Arrington the founder and former editor-in-chief of TechCrunch who is famous for investing in start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Not only that but he was partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now has his own fund, CrunchFund. All this to say that he has special interests in dozens of companies at any one time. When AOL bought TechCrunch they eventually let him go because in part of his conflicts of interest.
I guess the point I was trying to make is that the kinds of marketing that companies want these days is going to be far more immersive than your run of the mill ads. This, I think, was one of the main points of the parent comment. As such, I would postulate that the skillset necessary to write a good article, or in-depth (eg. investigative journalism) story, is very similar to the skillset necessary to create (or find?) the stories a company wants people to know about it.
Now, the tricky part would be to engage in both journalism and marketing so as not to uproot the integrity (or give people reason to think your integrity as a news organization has been compromised, or that you are engaging in business with clients who clearly create a conflict of interest.
For example, suppose you are a newspaper / magazine who has a reputation as being a "watchdog" publication for the oil industry. Now suppose that while that branch of your business has established a reputation as a "watchdog" publication for the oil industry, the marketing arm of your business has clients like Exxon or Shell. To maintain the integrity of your journalism branch perhaps you should be working with clients seeking marketing services from other (eg. retail) industries.
The only reason this synergy sounds reasonable and even plausible to me is the well documented "crisis" news organizations worldwide are facing these days.
[1] http://digiday.com/publishers/huffington-post-branded-conten...
Linux is such a win for me, works much better, most stable, quick and fluid system I have ever used, I do not want to change back to windows or osx. I hope Bitwig will survive and finally bring some more long term attention to the linux audio stack, which seems to be much better choice for making a computer a music machine.
I've been in touch over the years with Gerhard, Stefan and others and its been good to hear how they did solve those growing pains. I think its more than a hundred developers now.
Native Instruments had at one point 300, but they have a much larger product line. Always fascinating to talk with those guys about how they coordinate that.
We have the same goal at Splice, but we're focused on connecting the music creation process. Our core offering is a version control system for Ableton (Logic, Garageband & FL Studio also supported). You can also publicly share your sessions with our community.
Here is what a public release looks like:
https://splice.com/henryfong/henry-fong-j-trick-scream-origi...
I guess this video is mainly for recruiting, but showing users the people behind the software seems like it would have lots of side benefits.
(I mean I haven't pirated anything in a decade or two anyway, but I can't imagine child-me-who-sometimes-pirated-stuff pirating it. You know what I mean.)
It's a marketing video. "cue happy moment"..."cue warm and fuzzy employee interaction". It might make some people want to pirate the software even more!
That said, you can't pirate the Ableton Push hardware, which is where it's at for this latest generation of Live. The Push really is a nice piece of hardware - probably because Akai was behind the engineering.
http://www.askaudiomag.com/articles/interview-ableton-push-c...
p.s.: preparing to buy Komplete now for their FM8 and Massive :)
There is an attitude of "I'll pay for it once I start getting gigs" I've seen in more than a few people. I'm not going to debate whether this attitude is justified (the most basic full-featured editions of Ableton and most other pro DAWs start around $600 and go up from there) or not (Developers gotta eat). But it is certainly a viewpoint that is extremely common in the community.
I dislike the fact there's no standard file manager dialog, and the preview doesn't quite do what you expect - sometimes it plays-on-click and sometimes it doesn't, and I have no idea why - and the event editor is hard to navigate, especially if you want to micro-edit, and Arrangement mode still doesn't quite make sense to me, even though I've been using it for a long time now.
It's true that Live has that let's-all-Mondrian Euro look, which is a thing, I guess.
I used to use Sony Acid, so the time-stretch-on-a-grid idea wasn't new to me. And I really preferred the Acid UI. It didn't look as nice, being unapologetically Windows. But it never forced me to stop and think about how to do something, which Live certainly did.
In Acid you could just draw loops directly into an arrangement. This always seems complicated in Live, because of the switching between Session and Arrangement modes.
9 is mostly okay. I still think a lot of UI assumptions feel alien and not quite elegantly minimal. But having an open API is a big deal for users who want to do more than Mondrian-with-loops. And as a long-time Max user, M4L is a fun thing to have.
Ableton's automation system is slick too, making it trivial to hookup any key/MIDI input to anything. I got coded up an Xbox360 controller to work with it and it took under 2 hours flat.
I'm just a bit concerned for Ableton, because Live 8 seemed to be the big release (almost 6 years ago?), and Live 9 was not that huge of a leap and 9.1 was mainly bugfixes? From an outsiders view, it looks a tad bit worrying, like, what's going on? OTOH I guess it's good if they cede their massive headstart a bit as it'll drive more competition :).
Ableton's hardware controller is cool, but without actual pixel screens it seems rather weak compared to the Maschine stuff. Seeing how cheap screens are, I find it odd they can't toss on some real screens instead of dot-matrix ones on a $500 device. I think it'd be pretty wicked to be able to drop full devices onto the hardware, containing their full or optimized UI, then work more on-device.
But I'm not really an artist at all so perhaps I just don't get it.
I agree. Live blows Reason out of the water in terms of workflow. However, I've always this aspect of sound design in Reason. I enjoy dragging the cables around, controlling what flows where and modulates what in a physical way - even if its only superficial. Essentially, I just view Reason as fantastic instrument rack.
In fact, I self-produced a tribute to Snowden's NSA revelations[1] using no external sources besides my trusty Martin. It's kinda corny and the duel overlapping lead is out there, but overall it was an interesting exercise in learning the power of Live.
I think i did it sitting on my couch (no studio just a condenser mic) over a few days.
It is a ridiculously amazing music production platform, and my only wish is that I could be 15 again and start with it as my instrument of choice instead of guitar.
Great job by the development team in fixing almost all the crashes that plagued it for years...its very solid now.
[1]https://soundcloud.com/lostvegas-productions/for-what-its-wo...
You can create your own synths, effects, workflows... Incredible.
That said, this was a fantastic video and you've got my money. Keep up the great work on an amazing product.
Ableton, please fix your piano roll (make it like FL Studio's)! I've emailed you guys before, and even made a Youtube video showing why I hate it.
I love Ableton Live, but I really hope the open source community for music software matures to a point where it's comparable with Ableton.
Don't expect many people speaking English in small to middle size companies, nor in smaller cities.
I believe those are the high points.
The audio CTO during their best moments (Mike Rockwell) just left Dolby for Apple. But I don't think he'll be working on audio.
The state of audio technology (and audio software) remains in utter shambles. And not in a "needs disruption" kind of way. In a "needs a bullet to the head" kind of way.
Ableton is one of the rare bright spots and deserves massive props for being a pearl despite having to swim upstream through the shittiest corner of art and tech.
My musical journey started, and continues, to use Ableton as the primary musical instrument.
The APC40 is a beautiful, beautiful tool.
And, as @sitkack pointed out... they have a MOOC!!
I really don't understand people who hate animals. To be honest they are sociopaths in my eyes.
Disclaimer: I like dogs and probably wouldn't mind having one around during work. But if one of my coworkers would have problems with that, that should be taken into account and we should discuss it, work it out. Wording it differently than "people who hate animals" would probably help that discussion :)
You also can't ignore the fact that many people are likely going to have allergy issues. It's difficult to find a dog that a large number of people will be OK with.
developer dog
--------- ---
x x hairy
x x over-affectionate
x x personal hygiene issues
x spends time burying bones
x spends time buried in code
x chasing tail
x debugging
x can write C++
x x sometimes tries to lick own balls when nobody is looking
x succeeds
So back-licking is not that big of an asset.
That said, I've heard that ass-kissing can get you places in some IT companies though...
Yep. You might also notice quite a lot of 40s/50s/60s years old devs (unlike SF cliche). And that is great, of course.
Not many women in German software companies is also quite common, unfortunately.
Two, I imagine the number of non-white software developers in Germany is very, very small.
The idea it is "amateur software as best" flies in the face of the fact that most professional electronic producers use it if they use Windows, at least as far as I can tell from the various computer music magazines.
Regarding the interface being unintuitive, I think that could be true for those who are experienced in standard linear DAW workflows, and I could see how it could feel unintuitive for someone looking to record a Serato DJ session. It's got a lot of tools for music production, and you'd need to be in Arrangement view, not session view.
As a software developer and someone who likes to mess around in music production, the interface became incredibly intuitive once I did the (included) software tour and learned the difference between Arrangement View and Session View, and what could be accomplished in those.
In terms of music production (not DJing), the way instruments and effects are set up reminds me of objects, where you have data and methods. You create sound clips on instruments which are kind of like functions you can reuse. (Just a loose analogy)
If you build a bunch of clips on instruments in the Session view of these you can use them together to create a song that you improvise somewhat, within the sounds and drumbeats that you have pre-created. It's really fun if you play with it and get accustomed to how the software works!
correction: They still offer a separate 32 Bit installer - didn't realize, never looked back.
I've used Ableton but I found myself driven back to simpler tools that give a less digital sound. Also I sort of agree about the UI.