Image credit : Eksovichea Tito Hak
...whilst sat in an unconverted dusty dusty attic... the makeshift desktop setup.
Ableton Live 12 already on the verge of being rolled out?!!
I already dropped a stack on an Ableton 11 activation having used some form of pirated version with each new update and release of it since version 4 of Ableton live, and my Ableton laptop machine has been running infinitely smoother for it since with far less anomalous glitches (such as abnormally high CPU loads, erratic CPU load spikes, and fluctuations, entire project files going missing, at times even entire batches of project files, however, subtle modifications appear to be still happening to my projects when I come back to work on, or review saved projects that I'd made previously, even after only a few minutes to a few hours, which I guess are actually useful more than annoying this time round 🤔...but that's besides the point, since adding pressure variance to a laid down midi drum pattern/sequence is something I could have easily done myself). Thousands of projects later, the past 16 years of constant issues in some form with it has been quite, an ordeal when looking back having just thought about it properly just now.
I'm not running anything fancy hardware-wise, since its a second hand bought Dell Latitude 5491 running on an 8th generation Intel i7 8850H, and 16GB of RAM. Yeah, significantly well behind the 14th generation Intel curve, and most certainly well behind Apple's M1 for performance, let alone the vastly more capable M2, or M3! It's like a constant uphill struggle trying to streamline my Latitude 5491 machine, and keep it running smoothly, and fast, where I have to keep tweaking, and checking it constantly under the hood, which does make me seriously consider considering getting a Macbook Pro for the first time ever, which I've been trying to avoid doing doing to the insane cost of it. Additionally a fair number of the windows updates seem to constantly impact on system performance, and undo a lot of the performance improvement tweaks for my windows laptop DAW, which I don't have anything installed to other than Ableton live 11.
However word has it that version 12 of Ableton Live is imminent (which will no doubt probably be just in time for the release of windows 12 too), not but a month after myself finally personally getting a legit full version of Live 11 suite... Great 😵💫. Apparently it's got a bunch of new generative features for creating melodies, as well as some new interface tweaks, and some new colour scheme options. I doubt that I'll be personally moving over to 12, unless someone's willing to send me a copy of it, or I come into money, as it's still a wince inducing 700 to 750 quid for the full suite version when 12 finally lands. Since having used a legit version, of Ableton Live, I can't believe how much better it runs overall than the various pirated versions I've used, with far less project run issues, and at lower CPU loads too, I guess I'll see in the coming months if that remains constant, and hopefully it should fix all the screw ups, and project file anomalies on all my created, and saved projects that I'd encountered during the past 15 years too from here on out.
In any case aside from that, within the interim, anyone with a legit registered copy of version 9, 10, or 11 can sign up for the beta of 12 via the Ableton website, although acceptance for the Ableton live 12 beta testing program is an entirely different matter I guess.
I'd even suggest getting a pirated copy of 12 for testing if you can get a hold of one, although I wouldn't personally recommend doing all your serious work in it at this stage if you do. The only problem with doing that though is that Ableton tend to sneak in features in their new builds versions that do generally become indispensable once you incorporate it into you project/music creation workflow, which is why I won't be using 12 seriously until I have some means of actually running a full legit copy of 12 at this stage.