This does not have the same capabilities. Live just added support for AUv3 but generally third party Audio Units are not cross compatible and Note doesn’t even support those (yet?).

It does seem like Note could serve as a framework for porting Live to iPadOS with its touch oriented interface, but I do not think you could send it back and forth between the two without issue. Ableton doesn’t even let you load files saved for beta versions into regular Live, even if you’ve done nothing to the file.

Anything without analogue instruments doesn't need much to be found elsewhere (I'd argue also anything with analogue instruments doesn't either, but many prefer to track vocals, drums, guitars, etc. on Pro Tools or similar)

Mostly, though depends on the genre, and the kind of artist. Artists working mostly with analogue instruments, or that have huge sales and production teams, will tend to use other apps, mostly Pro Tools, and use Live as a starting point/sketchpad.

Producers and composers of pop and electronic music, that are not on the paycheck level of, say, top-charting artists, even if they still have tons of fans and a good career, do tend to do everything "in the box". It's perfectly capable. Heck, even FL Studio has created tons of "in the box" global hits...

I do my sketching wherever, actual production on bunch of hardware and only use Ableton to record final main output of hardware and do my mastering there, nothing else.

Producers be producing in tons of different ways :)

Also I don’t remember seeing a clip launch interface in SF Acid. It just did neat warping and looping, which was awesome … and thanks for reminding me about all my (very dodgy!) uploads to acidplanet.com :)

This app misses so badly because, by design, it makes such manual entry impossible. It actually hides the musical grid, and tries to focus on snippets of musical performance that are automatically (and invisibly) tempo analyzed and locked. This means that with wireless headphones the app is actually complete useless, instead of merely impaired.

Unless I’m missing something?

I've been using Live since 2015. My take on what it's got going for it is that it has a relatively streamlined interface, and is fairly opinionated on a particular way of setting things up, which makes learning it quicker. Instruments and effects for each track across the bottom. Make a bunch of tracks whose output by default feed into groups, which you can treat as busses. You can override the routing, but the default is easy to understand and straightforward. The stock devices cover 95% of what you need to do, generally "sound good" out of the box, and Max For Live provides a way to make custom devices that seamlessly integrate into the DAW.

Also the clip launching stuff and integration with the Push is neat. I suppose more DAWs have that capability now, but in 2015, Live made it easy.

If I were to pick a new DAW I'd probably go with Bitwig. Live is starting to feel like legacy software to me. Max For Live is too low-level to do polyphonic instruments easily, but the visual node-graph approach is harder for me than writing code would be. It sometimes hangs for 30 seconds at a time while I'm trying to flesh out some ideas, and find myself annoyedly sitting there trying not to forget what I was trying to do while Live gets its shit together.

the clip launching workflow makes it a great file for live sets, improvised electronic (or any other kind of music based on blocks), and so on

very streamlined for easy focus - many DAWs suffer from windows upon windows, in Live it's all (including built-in fx and instruments) in a single, non-MDI window, and all tools, fx, instruments, windows use the same widgets and concepts (not the case in e.g. Logic or Cubase)

automatic (and good) sync-to-tempo for audio, including several manual manipulation options (pitch/tempo/combo/etc)

opinionated fx and built-in instruments tuned to electronic and experimental music (including a full-on built-in version of Max, one of the most popular visual programming environments for building your own fx, instruments, audio/midi processing tools, and so on)

In the pre-DAW days, "audio engineering" was a specific task and skill set that was quite distinct from "playing music". Many DAWs were created to assist with audio engineering, assuming usage by someone who understands that domain.

Fast forward to recent times, and there's some widespread belief that a DAW should be a tool for musicians, even for musicians who don't know anything (or at least, not much) about audio engineering. "I just want to record my ideas".

So then someone cooks up some relatively simple DAW-like application for such people. They start using it, and within a few weeks or months, they find themselves unavoidably learning something about audio engineering. They want more from the application, and within a relatively short period of time, they need and/or want the full DAW.

The same thing is happening, to a lesser degree in the podcasting/radio production world.

Android notably does have some good apps for making music on it. There's a version of Cubasis on Android, Koala Sampler is on Android, Google had Teenage Engineering build a music app for Pixels, and I'm sure there's many other apps that have found a way to make it work, though I know for a fact that Koala Sampler has had issues with input latency due to the audio stack on certain Android Devices (where it becomes unplayable).

Apple's done a lot of work to make it a viable workflow on iOS/iPadOS. inter-app audio, AUv3, actual support for tablets, and a good audio stack are just some of the things they've done to make it a real platform for musicians. Google would have to put in a lot of work to make Android at all attractive to musicians and frankly I don't even know if it's worth their time. Still, they can do it and they've done a fairly good job of improving the state of Android for visual arts on tablets, so it's not impossible. Just a lot harder.

And you are right iOS is still the worst in Web audio. But if I'm to make a choice, I choose Web audio for the cross platform support.

> there's some widespread belief that a DAW should be a tool for musicians [...] I have no idea what I said that made you believe I was suggesting that musicians should not use DAWs.

And the rest of your comment is more holier-than-thou nonsense, mostly baseless and not accurate to any reality that I've ever heard of, much less experienced.

> DAWs used to mimic mixing consoles, but increasingly do not

Except all of the buttons and faders and everything else still look the same. You're completely making things up, and even your made up things don't prove your point. No other DAW developer or audio engineer in the world would back up your claim that DAWs aren't meant to be used by musicians.

> I know hundreds of professional musicians. Most of them know almost nothing about audio engineering other than a few buzzwords.

I've met thousands of musicians in my life, and 90%+ of them understand the basics of audio production. The musicians you know can't be very professional if they haven't ever encountered a situation where they learned anything about audio.

> You don't appear to be aware of the fact that I am a DAW developer

Because apparently my work in the field is irrelevant and I couldn't possibly know anything, right? Every company developing DAWs is primarily engineered by musicians. Just because other non-musical engineers get involved, doesn't make my statement any less factual. There are other aspects to software development (even in DAWs) that don't have anything to do with audio. As "someone in the field," you should know that.

I beg to defer. I understood what the parent said, but agree with him and disagree with your take.

You also come of as rude. And, to my experience with musicians, also wrong in making those general statements. Many pro musicians don't know about DAWs, and are too intimidated to even use

If your experience is mostly with modern pop/electronic/hip-hop etc mucisians, of course they'll know about DAWs. Or someone playing keyboards in bands, will too. And of course if you are a dev and have dev friends who play guitars and keys and such, they'll also know DAWs.

But there are many many genres outside that, and many pro musicians, or musicians that are not techy, where conventional instruments rule, and musicians who even take pride in not dealing with computers and DAWs, whereas other would like to, but find them intimidating.

And I'm not talking about 50-year olds here. I've recently had a music seminar with 20 or so other musicians, mostly 30 and below, with many at their early 20s, and people playing instruments like cellos, trumpet, etc could barely use basic external effects units, didn't know what things send/return is, and were totally lost of using a DAW.

>Your other two examples, essentially both being folk musicians, are completely wrong and you have zero basis for your assertion, which is apparently that folk musicians don't have any interest in sounding good.

This is not only wrong, but a bad faith strawman...

On the contrary, I think you've fully misinterpreted what's been said.

I’m sorry but this sounds like you just dismissed classical performers as insignificant musicians just because they don’t fit your categorization that “all musicians also do audio engineering”.

The world is wide, blanket claims like this is bound to have exception, by principle.