#588

I haven’t had to upgrade live in like fourish years i think… I’m running 9 right now.
Do we think there’s going to be an upgrade path from 9 to 11? cause i skipped 10 because i didn’t see anything i couldn’t live without, but now it’s looking pretty appealing, but I’m not really about to drop 400+ dollars for it :confused:

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#589

That’s the current deal. They’re offering 20% upgrades to Live 10 with a free upgrade to 11.

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#590

Good to hear, thanks for sharing!

#591

I don’t understand. I have the Live 10 Suite and the upgrade to Live 11 Suite was 159 Euro (which seems absolutely fair to me). Is there no similar upgrade path for owners of the standard license? That’s really weird if that is the case.

#592

will be picking it up before the upgrade discount closes! i’ve seen a bit of grumbling (not much but not none) around the web that they’re charging too much for what should have been a 10.x release. and my gut reaction was maybe similar, because i can remember buying live 10 and it was not that long ago (meanwhile 9 came out in 2013!), and all(?) of the main features for 11 are things people said never should have been missing from 10.

but honestly that gut feeling went away pretty quickly. i’ve been on live for literally 10 years now, coming from logic 7?, which at this point means i’ve put more hours into ableton than i put into viola from 5th-12th grade. this is totally mind blowing to me. i’ve long since been more creatively fulfilled by it than by playing classical music. i’m definitely better at it than i ever was at viola. i’d have to say that ableton is my primary musical instrument. so without really even considering how much use i’ll get out of the new features, i can feel my mindset slipping into “obviously i’m going to get the new one. why wouldn’t i?”

and really how i interact with the program feels more to me like playing an instrument than it does like using an application to be creative. this is a subtle but critical difference and i don’t make the claim lightly, being lucky enough to work with all kinds of creativity applications in my day job as a video editor.

if my math is right, the upgrade cost to grab 11 on release day for people who have a current version is like $5usd a month. and if you don’t want to, you get to keep using the old one. in that same time, adobe has billed my employer more than twenty eight hundred USD for me to have the misfortune of interacting with their applications! they also have an avid subscription…

also saw a couple of people on reddit complaining about the interface looking dated. no! ableton live has the cleanest and most functional GUI of any commercial creative software i’ve ever seen, audio or video. certainly there are some
aspects that feel undercooked compared to other DAWs, features it’s crazy it still doesn’t have, etc…but it’s really a “more than the sum of its parts” situation to me.

not sure how/why tricked myself into writing a whole post defending ableton from a series of hypothetical haters, but yeah, ableton is pretty good.

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#593

Yes, there is - you need to be logged into your account for it to show up though.
image

Although the way the upgrades are priced, seem like they are really pushing people of upgrade to Suite. My 10 Standard > 10 Suite (=11 Suite) is only ~£85 more than the upgrade above & I was planning on buying Sampler anyway.

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#594

Oh okay, thanks for clarifying. Then I just don’t understand what the poster above was talking about.

And I think at that price, the Suite is definitely worth it. There’s so many useful things - The devices themselves are great, Max for Live is the best thing that has ever happened to Live in my opinion (also the thing that stopped me from ever really considering switching to another DAW) and even the sample libraries are pretty neat (although many of them are somewhere in the space of “if you really needed these, you’d get something better”).

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#595

That would be Reaper I guess :slight_smile:

I’ve been running Live 9 for years now, and while some things in Live 10 were attracting, they didn’t seem too necessary. In fact, they were not, I’ve been happily making music all the time without them. But I did upgrade now, since I could jump directy from 9 to 11, and get a 20% discuount on top of it. I guess it’s worth waiting for the right moment to upgrade and skip some versions from time to time.

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#596

also, with note to Live pricing: broadly, Ableton have been highly “conservative”/“stingy” (delete as appropriate to your perspective) wrt Live’s pricing over time. However, they’re also - I think - relatively fair.

I got almost no discount going from Suite 9 to Suite 10 way back when, and we all grumbled at the top of this thread about the paucity of new stuff in 10.0 at the time; it felt expensive, no matter how nice Wavetable and Echo were.

The flipside of this is that Ableton major versions tend to have long lifetimes; 10.0 -> 10.5 has been much longer lasting than almost any other DAW or expensive music tool I can think of (eg I’ve seen a few Komplete upgrades go by in that time); each point release brought significant, meaningful upgrades, not just bugfixes. Ableton aren’t into the annual upgrades game (at the moment), and they tend to see each generation of Live as a platform to invest in over time, based on past experience. So the up-front entry costs are often higher, but the ROI over time seems pretty decent.

It never takes away the sting of “wait, I just bought this”. At the same time: it’s a fixed cost for a piece of software you will own and will continue to work. I will take that over the endless Adobe Treadmill any day.

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#597

Maybe also worth pointing out: The OS and comptuer requirements are not too agressive, meaning you are not forced to update to the “lastest and greates” OS version all the time and you can run it on not too recent hardware. Live 11 will run on High Sierra, which seems reasonable.
Live 10 still runs great on my 10-year old MBP. Of course this highly depends on how complex your projects are, but at least the DAW is not putting a big barrier upfront in regards to it.

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#598

I felt the (suite) upgrade price from 9->10 was a little high.
however, I offset that against that against the years of free updates to 9.x that we got from Ableton.

however, having used the beta 11 for a long time yesterday, I think the upgrade price from 10->11, is pretty reasonable given its has some substantial changes (comp-ing, mpe).
sure, if these are not features that are useful to you then you can always stay on 9.x

I also use Bitwig, and due to thier annual plan - I do not pay every year, I just wait until the number of new features feel ike the price is worth it to me.

#599

I must admit being a little tired of pricing discussions. I thought Ableton 10 was rough from the pricing perspective, but I also thought just like @TheTechnobear mentionned that Ableton hadn’t asked much money of me if at all for quite a few years before that and kept providing amazing updates so I really didn’t feel bad about giving them some money for improvements that proved to be more than cosmetic or shiny toys in the long haul since most of what they added on 10 I ended up using on a daily basis so really, no regret there despite feeling like it was steep.

But for this update specifically, I do find it super weird that some people, after an update that adds comping in a well thought out and intuitive way (they didn’t “just add it”) to a Software that will gain a lot from it since it will help Ableton become a more “start to finish” kind of DAW, advise as “more value and more affordable for struggling musician” to go instead to… one of the only DAWs left that doesn’t have native comping capabilities !

I’m sorry but for a lot of people, having comping inside Ableton might mean finally ditching other complementary DAWs for audio edit duty, which might be quite a substantial economy in the long run, and in that scenario (which I find myself in because I long considered going the Bitwig route, it seems like a fantastic DAW as an instrument kind of software) choosing Bitwig now (compared to switching before the 11 update which made sense) for me would be a huge step backward, having to make clumsy things like using session clip view to make alternates and then creating loads of tracks to edit them out, instead of the new way Ableton implemented it.

So no, Bitwig is far from being the obvious “struggling musician” choice, if anything, it finds itself in the position Ableton was in before this update: a very opinionated software that makes you commit to its particular workflow and strength, which makes up for the lacking features most other DAWs have had for years.

In any way, 160€ for the suite update is a very decent price for everything that’s in there. I admit it comes a little soon, Ableton 10 wasn’t released that long ago, but as it’s been said above, it comes down to a 5€/month subscription which is a hell of a lot cheaper than any subscription on the market right now for DAWs or plugin suites. AND you own your software.

And please let’s just not compare a GAFAM’s business model to a company the size of Ableton? Can we just not do that?

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#600

Live 10 was released in February 2018, which will have been 3 years before the Live 11 release in early 2021. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.

#601

I presume that was pointed at me. Sure, I can come up with any number of much, much smaller companies, all of whom want me to pay $20-40 a month for something that will stop working the second I stop paying them, because the trends that have been set by larger players have trickled down all around the technology economy. (See also: how pricing for identical plugins in iOS is vastly lower than on desktop, simply because of what the Market Will Bear, etc).

And besides, my point was that, again, Ableton’s supposedly “high prices” in reality vary from “reasonable over time” to “very reasonable over time”, depending on your perspective (especially when you take into account the continued functionality of old versions, @papernoise rightly pointed out). So I was agreeing? Regardless, I also presume that me responding isn’t the point, because you’re bored of pricing discussions.

#602

See I didn’t even realize it was that long ! (but it’s because I kinda took the release date as of “today” because I also used 10 long before it’s actual release so for me it’d be closer to 2 and a half year) ! It’s entirely acceptable I completely agree.

It was absolutely not pointed at you, I took your remarks as a defense of Ableton having a somewhat sound and logical business model for the size of the company, and overall I was actually agreeing with you. It was pointed at the comment :

“Contrast this with Logic Pro 10.5 which was offered free to current users. I realize for some Ableton is more woke than Apple, but you’ve got to ask yourself which DAW is the better value and more affordable for struggling musicians.”

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#603

in which case, apologies for prickliness, @LLK - sorry!

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#604

It’s ok, and actually it’s interesting because I should add, I’m ok with discussing pricing, it’s an important topic, but then let’s discuss it for real : What’s the value of work? What kind of companies do we want to see in the music making landscape? Venture backed? GAFAMs only so that prices are super low? Should affordability trump all other needs? Is a DAW supposed to do everything? If it doesn’t, should it be priced less? There are many questions but they’re questions, and they do not reside in a vacuum where you get to criticize people for charging a price on their work just because that price isn’t the price we want to pay for it. I guess the talk I’m not interested in is “Bangs for your bucks” as a case to point finger at devs. For example Reaper is cheap, but also Justin Frankel if I remember correctly made 100 millions by selling Winamp to AOL which made him comfortable enough to be able to sell a software like Reaper for a minimal fee. It’s so context dependant, in this fashion Ableton is much more “traditionnal” and it needs to sell, as a comparative note, Ableton’s anual revenue 18 years later, at the peak of their market domination is 60 millions. They have 350 employees. I feel like we can’t talk about pricing if we don’t talk about all those things, and it becomes a conversation on its own, and maybe then it doesn’t belong in the topic about Ableton’s new features.

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#605

Does anybody know how time limited the “limited time” upgrade offer is?

#606

I don’t know for sure, but if I recall correctly the Live 10 upgrade was discounted until 10 actually released (or maybe for a week or 2 after).

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#607

Yeah, I find it super weird that a lot of people complaining about the (optional) $179 update are the same people posting “shut up and take my money!” in threads about single-function $300+ modules.

Anyway, I love this update. It smoothed out a lot of bumps for me, and I’ll probably now just go back to using the built-in MIDI editor more instead of always using MIDI plugins. The additional Macro slots and memory are perfect since I can now further customize racks. New devices are incredible, and there are still a lot more announced but not released yet.

I built this fauxtechre beat yesterday as a 20-minute exercise with the new stock devices. This is just one of the Ableton preset Drum Racks, but I extended it with some macros to mimic the CTRL-ALL feature from MD/Digitakt. I randomized the probability on a few of the hits, added the two new Spectral devices, and ran some unsynced automation loops.

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