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Ableton Live deserves its reputation. i opened it up for the first time ever, created a blank new project, added a “External Instrument” track to control my MIDI module, played my MIDI keyboard and somehow it… just worked, first try? with incredibly low latency? oh my god
i'm surprised by the latency because this is going my fingers -> MIDI keyboard -> MIDI interface -> ableton -> MIDI interface -> MIDI module -> audio interface -> ableton -> audio interface -> my ears. did not expect the latency to be low enough to be playable. with no tweaking!
but mostly i'm pleasantly surprised that Ableton actually might be as easy to use as they say, even when you are that weirdo who chooses hooking up to obsolete 1990's hardware as their very first task. and the integration works shockingly smoothly too, it behaves like a VST would
- the only stumbling block i hit was not knowing how to switch from session view to arrangement view. i can't complain, it's very intuitive once you know it
- i knew about the External Instrument feature because of prior research, but it's the only Ableton feature i knew about
there's a lot of little things they got right for the new user experience. for example, i didn't have to manually route the MIDI input (keyboard) or audio output (earphones) for the Instrument, it was instantly playable!
another little thing they got right was that i did not have to arm the track for recording or create a midi clip. in fact, i have no idea how you do either of those. i just clicked on the track in the timeline, clicked record, played the keyboard, and it just made a clip for me.
rendering the project to FLAC and saving the project were trivial, but that's to be expected i hope!
oh, i also changed the MIDI program change number (GM instrument number) but that's the other feature i knew of from prior research (you may notice a theme), so