Live has been in my music-making arsenal since version 1.5 and it just keeps getting better. Once Ableton added MIDI to the mix Live basically replaced Digital Performer as my studio's heartbeat. Every release adds new capabilities without sacrificing immediacy of use. Amazingly, Ableton created Live barebones and added major features in a series of well-wrought steps, forging the program into a conceptually designed masterpiece without direct sacrifice to the perceived whims of a "me too" marketplace.

Live 5 continues the refinement...

Clip Freeze - I take digital audio and turn it into something else. I stretch, mangle, warp, destroy, re-fry, transmogrify until I end up with something so far from previous form you would be hard pressed to even admit the possibility of connection. This, my friends, requires serious processing power. The kind of power which will reduce your CPU to molten tears and keep your caffeine of choice steaming by simply placing mug near chip. Ableton's brilliantly managed Clip Freeze will turn an entire column of massively effexored clips into static samples, in place and with a single contextual menu click. I can then continue compositional mayhem using the frozen clips. A later tweak to the effects chain is as simple as unfreezing the track.

Launchable Arrangement Locators - Drop them all over your track at key locations, assign MIDI or qwerty keys to them and then play the broad arcs of your music, with quantization, in real time. You will never create arrangements the same way again.

Live Clips - Save a library of individual bits and pieces of sound, with all the effects, settings, audio or softsynths gathered into one Live Clip. Drop the Live Clip into a new track and it's all there, just as you made it.

And that's only the first few stairsteps up the mountain to the sky. New effects like Beat Repeat, Saturator and the customizable Arpeggiator, new ways of auditioning portions of audio, new ways of packaging sets of sounds and settings in Live Packs, batch pre-analysis of entire directories of audio... more unexpected fun than I realized I wasn't having in many moons.