If any of you were very busy much like myself, you might have missed the launch of Ableton Live 9. Im sorry to say I had missed the drop date, as it came out last month on March 5th. I definitely dropped the ball there. Oops.
I had been looking forward to this moment for months, and then I completely forgot. It hit me suddenly when I tried to take a look at a project file a friend sent me, and I got the fabulous “Your version of Ableton is not compatible blah blah blah,” message from Ableton. I went ahead and downloaded the trail version with some high hopes. Anyway, I wanted to give it a shot and come back with some of my thoughts on the upgrade.
There will almost certainly be some confusion with the versions available. I wrote a previous article discussing some issues I had (and apparently many people have had) with getting Fab Filter to be recognized in Ableton, (here). Essentially, you’ll need to be aware of matching your versions of Ableton, with your various versions of VSTs. This is the first time Ableton has been available in 64x for PCs, which is great in terms of performance, but it brings a few new headaches for all those producers without a whole lot of computer savvy. If you download the trail (or straight up purchase) for the new version, just be prepared to have some issues with your VST’s working properly. I grabbed the 64x version of Ableton, and I’d say about 95% of my VSTs wouldn’t appear. The reasoning – I had previously installed the 32x versions of my synths. Some automatically installed both 32x and 64x, and they were fine, but the rest had me confused until I came to this conclusion.
Now this won’t work in every single situation, I’m sure there are still just general compatibility issues as well, but this is just something worth pointing out.
So the moral of the story here: Match your versions, or update your synths. There are a few software alternatives that can spoof these changes for you, but I haven’t used any yet. If you have any recommendations, please let me know.