Ableton Beta 8 verdict – it’s not for me

Ok, so I guess I got a little ahead of myself in my last post. Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of the new features (looper, vocoder, workflow improvements) are awesome. I just got in a little over my head with the Beta version. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, Peter Kirn from Createdigitalmusic.com told me exactly what to expect months ago. Immediately after using it I started running into problems with MIDI mapping – a big part of my setup. Then there were a few times that the program randomly locked up. There were also some minor little problems that happened only occasionally, but combined it was enough to frustrate me.

I guess that’s why the program is still in Beta. It’s just not practical to make music on the software if you don’t know when it will actually work the way you want. Incidentally, a public Beta version was just released, allowing anyone with a version of Ableton 7 to try out Ableton 8 beta. I wonder if this means that they solved a lot of the major problems. I’m not going to bother finding out this time around.