I agree, and with over 15 years of experience with Live and a fruitful music career thanks to it, I have a deep respect for it. It’s hard to use anything else because of how many small, seemingly insignificant workflow features it has which add up quick in a session.
_But_ - man is it far behind the modern DAWS like Studio One and Bitwig in the low-level fundamentals like plug-in isolation, multithreading, and flexibility in terms of your ability to offload frozen tracks from RAM. This puts a bottleneck on the max size of a session before it becomes unstable and unusable. Even with 32GB RAM and a top-shelf CPU, my ability to finish a song grinds to a halt around the 100 track range. My songs can have 150 tracks with 1-20 plugins and 1-30 automation lanes per track by the time they are finished, and the number of hours I’ve lost from crashing or just waiting for it to respond could easily add up to months at this point.
And small things like the inability to know if a plug-in is the VST2 or VST3 version have been driving me nuts for over a decade.
My music is absurdly abnormal in terms of complexity though, and the vast majority of people will never encounter these problems. I worry, however, that the glacial pace of development likely due to the prehistoric tech stack at Ableton will prevent it from ever closing the growing gap made by the increasingly valuable feature sets of modern DAWs have been able to push out quickly and consistently.
Either way, Ableton Live is a great demonstration of the incredibly fine nuance involved in a good UX. They got a lot of little things right, and that alone has been the largest contributor to their success in the industry.
As a hobbyist musician even I notice Live's flaws. And while it does indeed get out of your way most of the time, when it doesn't you can't change it and it becomes frustrating. While other larger players in the industry are farther ahead, just how far behind Live really is becomes especially apparent when you look at Reaper. They're fundamentally different in their approaches, yes. But Reaper's pace for adding new features and how up-to-date they are in terms of the changing landscape of the industry (CLAP plugins, ARA2 support, etc.) is impressive considering their small team. But Ableton's focus with Live seems to be more towards adding content rather than features or large overhauls. At least that's my impression.
I genuinely love Live's workflow. It feels the most natural to me. But the ever growing list of annoyances and shortcomings make me look into other DAWs fairly frequently. Though sadly no other one has really stuck with me so far.
There was a defect in Live’s implementation of VST3’s UI that lead to poor UI performance (lag) that got fixed in the upcoming 11.3, it’s in beta test right now.
It most affected users with hundred of tracks and VSTs in most of them. No impact on VST2.
Controller script added for Novation Launchpad Pro MK3
Controller script added for Novation Launchpad X (via reassigning the Rec Button)
Controller script added for Novation Launchpad Mini MK3 (via the special 4th row buttons)
Controller script added for Akai APC Mini MK2
Controller script added for Akai APC Key25 MK2
Controller script updated for Novation Launchpad Pro (MK1)
Push is made by Ableton. I am not sure they are willing to help a company build by some of their ex developer who left them to build a new DAW with possibly stolen code and at least many ideas that were discussed internally.
Despite the headquarters proximity, I think they are not the best friends.
Not so sure about the "stolen" part. Bitwig code has a completely different code base (Java backend with UI written using Juce), and the sentiment at the time was that a few devs were frustrated by Ableton management rejecting several proposals that ultimately were implemented in Bitwig.
Also the multitake tracks UI that was implemented in Live 11 is basically a (slightly improved) copy of the same feature on Bitwig.
The stolen part mostly relates around the sales and distribution network, less around the code. Basically the sales equivalent of IP theft, and a really huge douche move by their CEO. Makes him very unsympathetic to me. Not as bad as Behringer but close.
_But_ - man is it far behind the modern DAWS like Studio One and Bitwig in the low-level fundamentals like plug-in isolation, multithreading, and flexibility in terms of your ability to offload frozen tracks from RAM. This puts a bottleneck on the max size of a session before it becomes unstable and unusable. Even with 32GB RAM and a top-shelf CPU, my ability to finish a song grinds to a halt around the 100 track range. My songs can have 150 tracks with 1-20 plugins and 1-30 automation lanes per track by the time they are finished, and the number of hours I’ve lost from crashing or just waiting for it to respond could easily add up to months at this point.
And small things like the inability to know if a plug-in is the VST2 or VST3 version have been driving me nuts for over a decade.
My music is absurdly abnormal in terms of complexity though, and the vast majority of people will never encounter these problems. I worry, however, that the glacial pace of development likely due to the prehistoric tech stack at Ableton will prevent it from ever closing the growing gap made by the increasingly valuable feature sets of modern DAWs have been able to push out quickly and consistently.
Either way, Ableton Live is a great demonstration of the incredibly fine nuance involved in a good UX. They got a lot of little things right, and that alone has been the largest contributor to their success in the industry.