Live 5 Caveat...

Since this seemed to start a dull roar in my inbox from all my peers who think I’m hitting the pipe, let me state for the record that there is no way one could possibly record and mix “real” music in Live 5. For starters, the meters are nearly useless. There’s no phase button, which implies that all Live users only own one microphone. The built-in EQ is whack, and the program and its various plugs are much heavier on the CPU than equivalent shit in Nuendo.

Also, I don’t know how to explain this, but there seems to be some second-order distortion in _everything_. Every sound I record or import seems to develop soft edges and fuzziness that I can’t explain. I thought it might be the audio interface, so I put it on my Big Box (Death Star) as opposed to my laptop (Tie Fighter), and it’s the same thing. So all the above, plus the annoying manner in which Live handles presets for its built-in stuff, would keep me from ever finding it useful for writing “songs.” But as a really sophisticated part of my modular, it is great fun. And I imagine it would be good live, as the name implies.

Your mileage may vary, of course. It’s no Nuendo, but then again it costs a fifth as much.