Ok first of all, just bought a Novation Nio sound card which comes with Ableton Live so I decided to give it a shot after playing around with Traktor or a while. A couple of initial comments/questions about it:
First of all, wow, Ableton is not nearly as intuitive as Traktor is. Traktor is pretty straight forward, here are your decks, here are the effects, here are your cue points. I'm struggling to wrap my head around how Abelton gets used as a DJing program.
Now correct me if i'm wrong but:
#1. As far as I can tell there is no way to give clips in Live cue points. This poses obvious problems like, where the hell am I in this song and how do i jump around between sections? It seems that you have to make individual loops of each section and work with it that way, is that the only way to do this? It seems like an extremely tedious way to go about things although I can see the benefits of doing this.
#2. If this is the case, is it impossible to seamlessly transition between clips? Like if one clip finishes playing can you set Live to automatically start playing the next clip in the section or do you have to manually trigger all the clips? If you can set it to automatically scroll through the clips like it is playing a song, things become much clearer to me.
#3. You can't see both waveforms at the same time. This seems like a big problem to me. Seeing the waveform allows you to see which section is coming up when and where the rises/falls of the music happen. Without being able to see both songs you are mixing at once doesn't that pretty much require you to have every song you own memorized perfectly? Or is there a way to get both waveforms visible? To me it's like trying to DJ blind.
#4. Because you seem to be working with individual clips as opposed to the song as a whole, doesn't Live require you to pretty much plan out everything you do in advance? If you are mixing 2 songs you need to know exactly what clips have to be triggered when. Not that you don't need to know this with Traktor's cue points, but at least you can see the whole song and all the cue points when you load it up so you have an idea of what's coming up next to see if it fits your needs. With Live it seems you need to know that "clip x on track 1 must start with clip y on track 2" by memory. (I'm not sure if that makes sense)
I may have the whole idea of Djing with Live wrong tho, im not sure. If anyone could clarify any of those points I would appreciate it.
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