Every one of these questions has been answered multiple times all across the interwebz. Honestly, if you can’t be bothered to check pricing how can you be bothered to learn how to use Abelton? It has a steep learning curve. Yes it is expensive. It works very well for doing mashups. No it’s not going to be easy.
I suggest you pick up the trial version. Actually one of our esteemed members is selling it for a good price! About 20% off the original price! I think you should check it out. Pick it up from him, try it out, and if its not for you just re-sell it. If it is, use it till you’re amazing at it, then upgrade to the full version!
Ableton is awesome. Nothing in the DJ world really compares to it in terms of flexibility and capabilities.
Frankly…Traktor (pre TP2) looks like a complete joke compared to Ableton if you’re just looking at raw power. Even with the sample decks, TP2 is kind of like the little red wagon to Live’s fleet of cargo ships.
But it’s expensive…the version of Live best for DJing costs like $400, plus $300 to $1000 for a controller and at least $100 for an audio interface. If you know what you’re doing, you can get away with a cheaper controller if you have to, but…it’s not ideal.
And it’s hard to use. If you’re looking to be spoon fed, you won’t find that much help.
Moguoi (sp?) just released his live set on Beatport for like $16 including templates and audio files, and there are a few people who have released very good templates online to use (will marshall, tom cosm, and s4racen come to mind). But just loading one up with no other idea what you’re doing will likely drown you in “wtf does this do?” questions for a while.
I’m pretty sure it took me longer to feel competent on Ableton than it did for me to feel competent on 1200s…and I knew what it was good for (and was right about it) the first time I saw it.
It really is incredible what it’ll do…I’m just not completely convinced yet that it’s actually worth it…and that’s after buying one of the $1000 controllers and spinning with it exclusively for like a year.
I never had luck with ableton with it’s warping >.> tried it on my friend’s PC and then compared the audio quality to Traktor, I found Traktor to reproduce the sounds better >.>