[NAMM] Ableton Live 8 and Suite 8

Live 8 and Suite 8 bringnew techniques, effects and workflow improvements. These include a new groove engine, revamped warping techniques, live looping, five new effects (including the Ableton Vocoder), crossfades in the Arrangement View, group tracks and a reworked MIDI editor. Ableton Suite 8 includes all that plus a sound library instruments, including a synths, a sampler, electric and acoustic drums (new: Latin percussion), mallets (new: Collision), sampled instruments and a new, Operator.

New in Ableton Live 8:

• New groove engine: new groove library, extract grooves from audio or MIDI, real time groove quantize
  
• New warping engine: warp audio events by adjusting the events on the timeline, updated Beats Warp Mode, new Complex Warp Mode, slice audio files to MIDI tracks based on transients
  
• Looper: classic sound-on-sound looping without the limitations of a hardware device. Record, overdub, undo and more without touching the computer. “First loop sync, ” simple loop management
  
• New effects: Vocoder, Multiband Dynamics, Overdrive, Limiter and Frequency Shifter
  
• Workflow enhancements: including real-time crossfades in the Arrangement View, enhanced MIDI editing, group tracks, multiple track selection, a screen magnifier and more

New in Ableton Suite 8:

• Sound library: cnew sound library with real-world “Sound Objects, ” presets, grooves, templates and, above all, over 1600 sounds
  
• Collision and Corpus: a physical-modeling instrument for authentic mallet sounds and creative percussion. Includes Corpus, a separate effect that reproduces Collision’s resonator section
  
• Latin Percussion: a collection of acoustic percussion instruments from the worlds of Brazilian, Afro-Cuban and African music plus a wide selection of clips and grooves for authentic usage
  
• Operator, Ableton’s synthesizer: New filter types, more modulation routing options and additive wavetable synthesis with drawable partials.

Plus these existing Ableton instruments: Sampler, Electric, Tension, Analog, Drum Machines, Session Drums* and the Essential Instrument Collection 2*.

*Boxed version only.

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY:
Ableton Live 8 and Ableton Suite 8 should be available in the second quarter of 2009, following testing and bugfixing. A public beta version of these products will be available soon.

Prices for Ableton Suite 8 start at EUR 549/USD 699 (download version).
Prices for Ableton Live 8 start at EUR 349/USD 449 (download version).

Upgrades to Live 8/Suite 8 vary in price, depending on the Ableton products you already own.

For more info: www.ableton.com.