• Perfect for hobbyist on a budget.

  
  As reviewed by docguitarman on 6/6/2010

  I am a hobbyist guitar player, who uses Ableton to create rock and blues recordings in lieu of playing with live musicians ? live Intro is the perfect tool for such ? and the price won?t break the bank. I was introduced to Ableton when I bought a Line6 UX1 recording interface which was bundled with the Live ?Lite? software. I have been a fan since, and have upgraded successively to Live Intro. I use Intro to record my rhythm and lead guitars, bass guitar and vocals on audio tracks, and use the midi tracks and instrument plug ins to play drums and other instruments. I use a tablature program (Guitar Pro) to export drum tabs to midi files which are then loaded in to Live Intro to be played by a drum plugin (XLN Audio's Addictive Drums, in my case -- which I also highly recommended). The bottom line is that Live Intro is more than capable of providing the environment for creating covers of classic four (and five, if you include keyboards) piece bands. In addition to recording, Intro has a very respectable set of internal effects plug ins ? compressors, reverberation and mastering chains. These pre-bundled effects allow me to create professional sounding masters, by merely drag-and-drop and a few minor parameter tweaks per your taste. I find particularly enjoy the reverberation units that simulate live sound of playing in concert hall, arenas, or even open fields ? again via simple drag and drop. I find Ableton's user interface easy to use and it became second nature after just a few sessions of use. There are of course limits to a budget program. Live Intro is the "light" version of Ableton Live and, as such, has some limitations from the full version. I found the major limitation is the limit on external (read "3rd party") effects and instrument plug-ins: 4 external instruments and 6 external effects. As I expanded my recording covers to songs that included brass, strings, grand pianos, etc., I reached those limits. In my case, I solved this by staying with Live Intro and purchasing Ableton?s Essential Instrument Collection 2 ? since these are Ableton instruments they do not count against the external limit (but there is a limit of 8 Ableton instruments in Intro, which is plenty for brass, woodwinds, strings, grand pianos and more!). You can find a comparison of the Intro?s features compared with Live at Ableton?s web site: http://www.ableton.com/pages/live_8/comparison_chart/live_intro If you are a hobbyist on budget looking for a feature rich budget DAW (digital audio workstation) for your home studio, I highly recommend Live Intro.

  24 of 25 people found this review helpful.
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• For the money it's beyond perfect!

  
  As reviewed by bandeeto on 11/10/2010

  For this price you can buy a LOT of production, dj, remix, recording, beat making forepower. Live intro is great until you get good at it, then you want Live 8 (full version). That's the only draw back. I frequently work on Live Intro for 10 hours straight, that's with an audio interface, Novation Nocturn, Novation Launchpad, and Akia MPD18 connected, through a USB hub, without any issues. No freezing up. No sound drop outs. No issues recognizing hardware. It starts up and works, all the time, every time. The included sound library is pretty extensive, but spend some time with Intro and you'll want more sounds pretty soon. This isn't a problem as you can download more from Ableton (some even for free) and there are lots of free samples, many of them just as good as anything you can buy, online. Also it's very easy to sample from any sound source. Live Intro is compatible with every format under the sun, except for REX i believe. Find the beats, hits, samples, whatever online or make your own. It's easy and quick once I learned how. I went from a complete noob fumbling with the free trial of Live 8, to buying Intro as an interested noob, to someone who can actually make what I hear in my head. It's so easy to sound good with this program. I don't have the money for Live 8 yet, but until I do I'll be working with Live Intro every chance I get and because of this I know that when I do step up to Live 8 I'll be able to get the most out of that program, and it will be money well spent. Oh yeah, also I figured out that buying Live intro + Live 8 upgrade from intro separately from guitar center only $10-15 more than downloading them from Abletons website AND I get a much larger library of sounds and instruments when I buy the boxed version. I don't see how anyone can loose with this software. Buy intro now, then upgrade to Live 8 later, pay less, get more sounds/instruments! As you can tell im pretty stoked. Hope this give people an idea of what Live Intro is about. It can be fun and simple or powerful and all consuming (my computer has become a black hole that sucks up ALL MY TIME. Just ask my wife). Later

  20 of 21 people found this review helpful.
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• OK by itself, not with rewire

  
  As reviewed by John Richards on 1/15/2011

  I bought this at GC on their recommendation for rewiring it with Reason and using my Amplitube VST plugin. With this setup, it crashes (on my new 27" iMac) at least twice per two hour session, usually when saving or stopping or configuring, even after downloading the latest version. Tech support said they are working on it. By itself, it seems to be fine, and the instrument sounds are excellent, but I don't need it for that.

  3 of 6 people found this review helpful.
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