Ableton Live 8 is your companion during every stage of the musical process, from creation to production to performance. It offers two main views-the Session View and the Arrangement View-that interact in a powerful and unique way, to let you create, produce and perform your music all in a single application.

Session View acts as a powerful musical sketch and launch pad, letting you try out new ideas easily and improvise freely. Each cell in the Session View grid can hold a recording, MIDI file, or any other musical idea. These ideas can be recorded on the fly or dragged in from the Browser and played in any order and at any time you wish.

Arrangement View offers a timeline-based approach for traditional multitrack recording, MIDI sequencing and other music production tasks. You can even improvise in the Session View, and all of your actions will be recorded into the Arrangement View, where they can be edited whenever you like.

New in Ableton Live 8 include:
• New groove engine: Groove patterns dynamically influence the timing and velocity/volume of audio and MIDI material. This can add life and swing to straight patterns, give a track more drive, or lend a piece an easy, laid-back feeling.
• New warping engine: Live 8 is the next logical step in warping evolution with a new, more intuitive warping paradigm and some important Warp Mode enhancements.
• Looper: Looper brings the creative power of classic sound-on-sound looping to Live, without the limitations of a hardware device. Inspired by some of our favorite sample/delay devices plus a good deal of Ableton wizardry, Looper provides plenty of scope in a super-simple interface.
• New Effects: Live 8 includes five powerful new effects: Vocoder, Multiband Dynamics, Overdrive, Limiter and Frequency Shifter. These effects cover all the well-known aspects of these devices, but really shine due to some innovative features and enhancements from the Ableton labs.

Main Features:
• Multitrack recording up to 32-bit/192kHz
• Complete nondestructive editing with unlimited undo
• Powerful and creative MIDI sequencing of software and hardware instruments
• Real-time time-stretching and warping of AIFF, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and MP3 files, for improvisation and instant remixing
• A comprehensive selection of built-in audio effects, including a host of creative delays, filters, distortions, studio compressors and EQs
• Built-in software instruments: Simpler for creative sample-based synthesis, Impulse for sampled drums
• Instrument-, Drum-, Effect Racks for creating and managing complex performance setups, drum kits and multi-effects
• VST and AU effects and instruments support; automatic plug-in delay compensation
• REX file support and native sliced audio file creation
• Video import and export for scoring to picture or warping picture to music
• Real-time control of parameters with any MIDI controller-just MIDI-map it or choose from a list of popular supported controllers for instant mapping
• Full ReWire support
• Single-screen user interface for simple, creativity-focused operation
• Multicore and multiprocessor support
• Essential Instrument Collection 2: A multi-gigabyte library of meticulously sampled instruments providing a choice selection of acoustic and electric pianos, guitars, bass, drums, orchestral strings, brass, woodwinds and more (boxed version only)
• Unnatural Selection: Loops and construction kits (boxed version only)

System Requirements:
• Mac: Any G4 or faster, (Intel Mac recommended) 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended), Mac OS X 10.3.9 (10.4 or later recommended), QuickTime 6.5 or higher, DVD-ROM drive
• Windows: 1.5 GHz CPU or faster, 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended), Windows XP or Windows Vista, Windows compatible sound card (ASIO driver support recommended), QuickTime 6.5 or higher, DVD-ROM drive