Project 5 ver. 2 vs Ableton Live

ORIGINAL: DigiDis

Note to Cakewalk marketing. As a longtime customer of Cakewalk since ProAudio9 through Sonar 4PE, I am sorry to admit I bought a competing product. I now want my music composition to be very similar to riding a bicycle. In short, I want my full attention to be on the road and to not have to dedicate attention to mechanical details. A superior bicycle will include novel technologies that make the bicycle more powerful and functional while enabling the rider to concentrate even more on the road. I think you still have this advantage with Sonar over Cubase, but not yet with P5. Please pull P5 in this direction.

ORIGINAL: DigiDis

Back to the question, what I personally liked more about the workflow in Live4. Recording into groove clips while in session view. Get the scene going, arm the track and click the clip and go. When the recording is done I just place the clip's loop markers to cover the bars I want and its done. No Arrangement view recording, cut the clip, drag it into session view, and remember to turn on looping. Then I discovered that I should continue recording multiple takes and then variations all right there in session view, all at the same time. This way all I had to do was copy the clip to a new slot and change the loop markers and voila! unique variations.

I also personally preferred the Live interface. Everything's there but not in the way. I also remember that with P5 you could mix and match between the groove matrix and the arrangement view. Cool, but I was always running into situations where an arrangement track was playing when I wanted a groove clip and I'd have to remember to switch a direction button to get back. Little minor things like that and searching for this and that distracted me. Remember, this is a personal experience and your mileage may vary.

Since I use Kontakt a lot for drums, bass guitar and synths, I usually load all into Kontakt and run 1 instance. Although I figured out how to use multi-out instruments in P5 with the track layers, it got too confusing to use multiple clips with 1 instance of Kontakt and resorted to using 3 or more instances of Kontakt. Anyone ever figure out how to do this? With Live I found I could easily just make different tracks for each instrument and then route the midi to the track that housed Kontact and just select the instrument's midi channel. From there I could make infinite numbers of midi groove clips and not get lost in routing.

Other minor inconveniences, I like punch in/punch out recording but didn't see it in P5.

OK, now that I hopefully answered the question, I want to point out that I am not, at all, saying Live is better than P5. In fact, I think P5 V2 was a serious grand slam home run for Cakewalk and I can only imagine whats cooking for V3. Its technologically far more advanced than Live, comes loaded with useful soft synths, (Live's Operator, Simpler and Impulse are jokes) has better midi implementation and has a much more progressive and powerful development team behind it.

I just felt odd extolling the virtues of a competing product. However, I am a senior marketing consultant and understand that my product buying decisions are useful for their market planning. I just happen to be part of a growing group of home musicians who are searching for simplicity instead of more bells and whistles. Maybe this is why softwares such as Live, Tracktion and EnergyXT as becoming so popular.

So maybe Cakewalk is just beginning to market P5 to that wide world of guitar players. Just a thought. I'm sure P5 product/project leader, Jesse Jost, as a guitar player has given this some thought.

but this is certainly something you could push ahead with