Oh, yeah, and Live 9 also has a new “disco” color scheme skin, if you like. Photo (CC-BY) Andrew Malone.
One of the tough things about reviewing software is that your own experience is intensely personal. So, I’ve regularly reviewed software and gotten an angry response from someone who didn’t understand why I didn’t comment on a particular stability experience they had found.
Those readers are right to be frustrated, but I can tell you that it software experiences are highly variable.
So, I do know that some people found some issues with Live 9’s newest features. None of it is so out of the ordinary for this kind of upgrade. A big culprit: the new smart browser indexing features. In particular, many users found that larger libraries were very slow to load, particularly on OS X. Worse, because of the way Live indexes files, these could cause degraded audio performance when you first opened a session.
Live 9.0.3 includes a number of improvements, but based on feedback I’ve gotten, I suspect these indexing optimizations will be the most important. Specifically:
The performance of the Ableton Index process has been improved, especially on OS X.
The Ableton Index process would sometimes not scan all folders after adding them to the sidebar.
The Ableton Index process could block the GUI during saving and exporting of Live sets, presets or clips.
Scanning folders containing a huge amount of files could take longer than necessary.
I don’t have a very big Library, so I couldn’t test this easily. If you were one of the people having trouble, I’d love to hear from you as you try this fix.
Also worth looking at, Live now gives you a choice at how you trigger new clip recording, which looks useful:
Added a new option to the “Record/Warp/Launch” preferences pane: “Start Transport with Record”. If activated, the transport will start immediately when clicking on the Session- or Arrangement-Record buttons. If deactivated, it prepares for recording as in Live 8, so you have to launch a clip in Session View or click the ‘Play’ button. You can hold down the Shift modifier key when clicking on the record buttons to invert the behavior temporarily.
Update: unfortunately, as I write this, 9.0.3 is temporarily unavailable. We’ll update you when it is again available. These should be the changes you can expect when it does become accessible, though.