Assuming you haven’t already hit Ableton overload with all the news announced this week, Ableton has posted a set of videos that do a pretty nice job of demonstrating the features. I’ve assembled them into a playlist here. (Stumbled on these videos thanks to Synthtopia.)
There are four videos in the playlist, covering Live 8, APC, Max for Live, and Share.
In particular, one video shows how the Share collaboration feature will work, with the ability to easily upload sets and share them either publicly or privately. (There’s a long introduction, but skip halfway through and it starts to talk about the actual solution.)
To me, the big question there is how much it’ll cost. It is nice to see an embeddable widget. Even better would be to have an open API – any chance of that, Ableton? That’d allow web developers (cough) hook into these features for other tools. Imagine if SoundCloud, for instance, which offers audio sharing and commenting, could also link more easily to projects uploaded for Live. Now, Ableton could keep control over Share and work with SoundCloud individually, but then they might miss Bandcamp or some other service they didn’t see coming — you get the idea.
Note that Live isn’t the first to ponder online sharing features, either. FL Studio has its own Collab feature, which nicely enough offers its own chat client – something I wrote about for Keyboard Magazine. I can imagine a world in which the Live Share option is just one of a number of similar features — making an open API all the more interesting. (I can’t actually find that Keyboard article, but I know I wrote it!)
More on Ableton at NAMM here on CDM:
Akai APC40 Video from Ableton; More Controllers Coming
Ableton’s Upgrade Options: Easier to Understand than a Large Hadron Collider
Ableton Live 8, Now with Grooves: The Top 8 New Features
What Makes the APC40 Special: Interactive Clip, Device Control, Dedicated Buttons
Ableton: You’ll Be Able to Customize Akai’s APC40 Using Max for Live
Akai APC40 Ableton Live Controller, in Detail: Plug-and-Play Live Control For Everyone?
Updated: It seems that Collab is no more?
And Key of Grey has a nice story wondering about alternatives to this kind of integrated tool:
Collaborating on a music project online