I have recently decided to get a copy of Ableton Live for doing live gigs at bars and house parties. Performing live shows is something pretty new to me and Ableton Live is definately foreign to me. I have been looking at the prices of both Ableton Live 8 and Ableton Live Intro. Are the differences between these two versions so noticeable that they make Intro not worth purchasing? In all honesty, I don’t have the money to buy a license for 8, but I can totally afford Intro. Will Intro have enough features for me to do pretty good live sets or is it so crippled that I might as well suck it up and save for version 8? I need the software to be able to take a bunch of samples of chunks of Renoise tracks and keep them synchronized and set up to be triggered and tweaked. Can Live Intro do this? I don’t need it to be my main compositional workstation or audio editor or anything like that. I already have software to take care of that stuff. I simply need it to be utilized for live music. Other than Ableton, my live setup will consist of my pc, a Numark M4 dj mixer, a Korg Nanokontrol midi controller, a Korg Kaoss Pad 3, and a prosound Gameboy running LSDJ. Please give me some good advise. Thanks.
Yeah, look at hitori tori! His live stuff is amazing!
This isn’t an optimal solution, but: keep in mind that an unlicensed copy of Live does everything but save. So, you could theoretically do all the Live DJing in the world without owning it as long as you don’t care about setting up your set in advance…
How many clips can each scene have? For my live set I’m planning on using Ableton for a chunk of my set. Then when the file is sucked dry I will beatmatch and crossfade over to the audio from my gameboy and do some tweaking in LSDJ. For the transitions I will utilize my dj mixer and kaoss pad to make them smooth. Plus the song files in both Ableton and LSDJ will be at the same BPMs. While I’m using LSDJ, I will be loading a new file in Ableton. Then when the LSDJ file is sucked dry, I will beatmatch and fade back over to the pc’s audio and utilize the now newly loaded Ableton file. And so on and so on… With this live setup in mind do you think that the limited scene counts would really be that crippling?
I have attempted running Renoise for live sets. It just seems to be more geared towards in studio compostion and producing and not for live use. It does seem to be getting there though. Maybe it will be great for live stuff in the next few releases. I have heard of other artists using it live, like Vaccine, but what I’ve managed to do with it and my really basic midi controller just doesn’t seem to be enough.
Interesting. Is there a timeout for the unlicensed demo copies? Or a limited trial time?
Yeah, rnoise isnt quite there yet compare to abelive, i agree. amd bantai is right, it’s not as simple as rendering all the renoise channels down and using live to sequence them. I never tried it, but after playing with live 8 i knew it wouldn’t be worth the hassle. I’ve never played a live set for an audience, but most of my renoise tracks lately have evolved from experimenting live within renoise and now that you can trigger any pattern to play next in the pattern arranger, renoise would be what i would use for live hands down. i always say this in #renoise, but once each channel box in the pattern matix has it’s own independent ‘play’ button, then it would be even more efficient to sequence live.
You might consider Usine instead of Live. There’s a free version of Usine to but I’m guessing it’s too limited for your live performance, but the full license is €120 so it’s about the same as for Live Intro…
Usine is really geared for live performances and is very flexible. As you are not into Live yet I think it’s worthwhile to look into Usine as you need to go through the learning curve anyway.
The method you describe, which is similar to what i figured I needed to do, is still too much work for me. But I should have noted above that my way of performing renoise made tracks would be to activate the channels i want to be played while using kp3 touch pad for left hand automation tweaking while i use mouse + x/y device in right hand for another automation at the same time when needed. granted i would like more abletonlive-like sample triggering, but that’s okay, i have to be a little more prepared.
hitori tori says: Forget about Live, stick to renoise, and buy an Ohm64.
(Wasn’t an actual quote, but I’m sure he’d agree.
Thanks to everyones’ advice I have come to the conclusion that I really don’t need Live. The more I’ve been thinking about it all of the problems I had with running Renoise live were really due to the limitations of my MIDI controller and not to Renoise (well for the most part). So now I’m pretty sure I would wrather invest my money on a Novation Launchpad as apposed to Ableton Live. I beleive with this MIDI controller as well as my Korg Nanokontrol I will have more than enough options for triggering and tweaking patterns in Renoise. Thanks!
Abe Trismegistus:
cool decision 
Tehnik:
I guess one time renoise would be suitable for DJing as well as for other stuff…
…
How far is the Day when we will be able to play blocks of different pattern from different tracks simultaneously?
I can’t wait!
Hmmm do you mean something like this? 
Anyway, I think it’s pretty doable to play with renoise in a live situation, but again it’s tricky!
Yes tricky…very tricky. But yes still doable. This is probably the best way to describe using Renoise live.
Maybe you could ReWire 8 instances of Renoise into Live Intro… 
That would be bananas!
OH MAN! I just realized that you can load midi mappings inside renoise without interrupting audio. This has been allowing me to bypass the limitations of my midi controller which only has a mere 18 trigger buttons. I just start my live renoise files with my first midi mapping then when it’s used up I load in the next mapping all while the music still flows.
It’s clearly a very cool idea, if it’s possible to load in the next mapping (using midi) without touching the mouse then it would be great! But I have no idea whether it’s possible or not …
It’s totally possible to load in new midi mappings without interrupting the audio and it’s actually pretty fast and easy, however you must do some mouse clicking as far as I know. But like I said, even with the mouse clicking it literally only takes like a second to load. I’ve been basically getting up to my last triggerable pattern in renoise. Then when I don’t need it to loop anymore and I need to go on to the next pattern I simply turn off the loop mode and let it flow to the next pattern. As it flows down to the next pattern I simply load in my next midi mapping and turn the loop mode back on. It takes a total of like 7 clicks: loop mode off - options - midi mapping - load - double click new midi map file - loop mode on. That’s it, and then you can go right back to using your midi controller.