Under-the-sea coloring for Push. Because when the sardine begin the beguine, it’s music to me.
If Push’s whites have been giving you the blues, everything’s better down where it’s wetter. And while some readers happily dove into the Live 9 waters right on release, recent bugfixes have made this software significantly more mature. (Uh, read: yeah, some stuff was rather broken for a bit there.)
First off, just for fun, let’s talk about making your Push “seapunk” in coloring. RGB LEDs have gotten brighter, but color calibration remains an issue, and so many Push users have complained about inconsistent white coloring. Even if you haven’t had calibration issues, too, you might just want a change. New York-based hardware hacker and musician Mark Triant took matters into his own hands. The resulting blue-green color scheme is for aesthetic purposes only, but it does show what’s possible when the open source community shares scripts. Accordingly, you can install this yourself via his GitHub site – or let it lead to your own mods.
https://github.com/mrk/seapush
Of course, one thing you shouldn’t have to hack is anything to do with bugs or design flaws in Live itself. There, we did hear dissatisfaction from some readers on the initial release of Live 9. 9.0.3 was a vital release, as reported here previously, in that it addressed significant performance issues with disk indexing and changes to automation recording. 9.0.5 has more individual fixes rather than any big banner features, but it delivers on a number of other issues. Ableton has the whole changelog, so if you’re a hard-core Live user, you may want to read the whole thing. The highlights, though, are under two major headings:
1. GUI performance is improved: it’s no longer blocked by the indexing at launch, or slowed by sets with a large amount of devices. (Here’s part of why it’s hard to report on this: I pared back number of devices way back in Live 8, so I certainly wouldn’t have seen this bug.)
2. A variety of plug-in related crashes have been fixed. (This is I think the source of a number of crash complaints from some readers and colleagues; a couple of the specific bugs I had seen.)
Push is also enhanced (and less crash-prone under certain conditions). Most notably, you can finally browse through folders you’ve added to Places in the new Browser.
Updates on Ableton. Also, with the help of my friend David, the Ableton blog has been absolutely killing it lately – posts with some real artistic integrity, not just sort of marketing business. It’s nice when vendors sometimes make us a bit jealous.
We’d welcome your reports – positive, negative, constructive – on how things are working for you in Live and how you use it in your music. So do write us.