Ableton announces Live 4. Live 4 extends Live's real-time music-making approach to the complete range of today's music-production techniques. Ableton Live is the music-production solution that allows you to spontaneously compose, record, remix, improvise and edit your musical ideas. Live brings your acoustic, electronic and virtual instruments, as well as your digital audio recordings, together in a single interface with unparalleled ease of use. In the end, Live lets you focus on what really matters: your music.

New Live 4 Features include:

MIDI sequencing:
Live 4 also includes the 'Simpler' sampling instrument, which allows for instant sampling, polyphonic playback and creative exploration of any sound dragged into its display. 'Impulse' is a polyphonic percussion sampler with drag-and-drop sample import and powerful and innovative sound-shaping controls. In addition, Live hosts any VST or Audio Units (Mac OS X only) plug-in instruments. MIDI tracks with no software instrument can deliver MIDI to external hardware synthesizers, ReWire client programs or other MIDI tracks in Live. Live 4 also includes 5 MIDI effects. The 'Scale' effect, for instance, forces incoming notes onto a chosen musical scale and fits well with 'Random,' which creates random deviations in note pitch.

MIDI Clips:
MIDI clips are created by recording or by dragging in Standard MIDI files from Live's Browser. Notes can be viewed, created and edited in the Clip View's Note Editor. When Draw Mode is engaged, the Note Editor behaves like a drum-pattern interface, where a pattern step is set or cleared by a single click, and flams are created by dragging across multiple steps. Unlike a static drum grid or step sequencer, Live's flexible grid allows the user to change the step resolution at any time.

MIDI clips, like audio clips, have their own loop settings. MIDI-controller movements are represented as clip envelopes, which can be unlocked from the notes to create independent movements. The same real-time options apply to MIDI clips as they do to audio clips: MIDI clips can be launched at any time, with real-time quantization preventing rhythmical error. MIDI clips can be assigned to computer keys or MIDI-note ranges for jamming with musical phrases. MIDI clips can also be exported from Live as Standard MIDI files.

MIDI Recording and Patterns:
Patterns can be built up on the fly by overdubbing MIDI onto clips while they play in a loop. In conjunction with the new 'Impulse' percussion-sampling instrument, Live offers the options for spontaneous creation that are normally associated with hardware groove boxes. You can also One can also use the computer keyboard to play Impulse's drum samples and create grooves from the laptop alone. Standard linear MIDI recording and overdubbing are available in the Arrangement View.

Flexible Routing:
New monitoring, track routing and view navigation allow non-disruptive track setup and recording. Any track can feed and tap other tracks for submixes or layering, or be routed to eight auxiliary sends per Live Set.

Other new Features:
- Swing and Groove
- Sample Reverse: A single button can reverse any audio clip in real time.
- Session View scenes can change the project tempo.
- Session View scenes can be set to advance automatically.
- Audio performance has been optimized for Macintosh computers."

A public beta test will be announced later this month.

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