In this series Ableton's manager technical support, Dom Wilms - speaks out about the future of music making. For this edition we asked him about Live as collaboration platform.
To be honest, Ableton Live 8's collaboration module is a bit of a disappointment. It offers a convenient way to share live sets, but we expected more!
"The share feature was just introduced about a year ago and is currently about to leave the beta phase. And yes, as the name "Share" suggests, the functionality of this very first step into the collaboration direction is still pretty basic and only about sharing projects online instead of working on them with multiple persons in real-time.
"There's a reason for this. If you take a look at the history of Live, this is just how Ableton is rolling: Live 1 focused on very few functions compared to other existing applications - but the few things Live 1 offered were just spot on, very stable and everything could be done in real-time unlike all other tools on the market. This formed the core which future developments based on and what Live has become nowadays. Nearly everything you can find in Live today was also planned right in those very first days - but in order to create a product like this while matching our own standards, you can't do it all at once and expect it to be perfect - you have to do it very carefully and step by step to get it right.
"The share feature is pretty similar: What it offers right now is more or less really just that - sharing. Simple, but really thought thru. Therefore it can be seen as a first step into the whole online, collaboration and community direction. Based on the experiences made now it is very likely that there will be further development of this topic."
Community based collaboration? We Are Laptoprockers!
Last time Dom talked extensively about Ableton's new baby: Max for Live. Expect more discussion on the subject of on-line collaboration in the next installment of this series.
