(New York City, USA) - Since its beginning, Ableton Live has continued to progress from a DJ/Loop manipulation concept into a full featured production sequencer. Version 7 adds many new improvements and additions to build upon where 6 left off. In doing so it's maturing into a very powerful and creative DAW that might, as I have done, pull a few people away from their current, 'traditional' sequencer of choice.

At a glance, some of the new features offered in 7 are: a new compressor model, side chaining (although not available with the new model), external hardware support, the Drum Rack, REX support, and easier automation editing. The audio engine has been upgraded to 64bit in certain areas of the path and MIDI timing improvements have been made. Interestingly and welcomed are two white-papers covering the technical details of both of these processes and what to expect with the updates. Whether or not you will hear 64bit increase in resolution is doubtful, but they have at least given some idea as to what is going on under the hood and this is at least helpful to know. Some has been said of Lives mix-down quality but I have found it (starting with 6) to produce excellent results so in my mind a change was not needed. One should of course be careful with the warping feature and how this affects quality though but this is a separate issue from the mixing engine itself. In keeping with current trends with dance music production, Live 7 now offers native side chain support. It's implemented very easily and provides that this useful technique to always at hand when needed. To achieve the effect you simply engage the side-chain control and then select with audio stream should be used as the 'key' for the compressor. This works well with the new 'Drum Rack' as one is allowed to use audio points both pre and post of effects on each 'pad' (more on this later) for maximum flexibility. The sound of the compressor with side-chain on works very well for the application intended and I've found myself reaching for it many times due to the convenience and musical sound quality.

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