Cycling '74 and Ableton to Codevelop New ProductsThe world of creative media software tools is about to get a lot more interesting. A new strategic partnership between Ableton and Cycling '74 promises exciting developments on the horizon for digital media creators, producers, and performers. Ableton CEO and cofounder Gerhard Behles and Cycling '74 CEO David Zicarelli are pleased to announce this unique alliance between the two dynamic and innovative audio/video software companies.
"We've been excited by the idea of bringing the worlds of Ableton and Cycling '74 together for a long time," says Behles, who has been a fan of Zicarelli's company for many years. "In our own musical work," Behles says, "we have been avid users of Cycling '74's products since long before Ableton existed."
Behles and the rest of the Ableton team have long been inspired by Cycling '74's commitment to empowering creative people. "Cycling '74 represents the idea that artists should be free to create the tools to match their unique creative vision—that the making of the tools can become part of the creative process," says Behles. "That's an inspiring thought, and we admire the Cycling '74 team for delivering on this fascinating promise."
Zicarelli was first introduced to Ableton through musician, composer and conceptualist Robert Henke. "Robert was a big Max user," says Zicarelli, referring to Cycling '74's graphical development tool for music and multimedia. "He introduced us to the people at Ableton, and he suggested almost immediately after Live was released that he would love a way for the companies' products to work together." Zicarelli found Henke's suggestions hard to resist. "Robert can be very persuasive when he talks about what he would love to see."
Zicarelli expresses admiration for the care and sheer effort that has gone into the creation of Ableton's flagship product, Live. "One of the things we've come to appreciate about Live," says Zicarelli, "is that its ease of use comes out of incredible attention to detail. Ableton works very hard to make it seem as if the software just works. That has been very inspiring to try to apply to our own product development."
Behles describes the creative vision and hopeful spirit behind the collaboration: "We feel the Cycling '74 approach to designing software for the creative community perfectly complements Ableton's. By integrating the technologies in a meaningful way, both companies can stay focused on their key strengths, avoid diluting their product philosophies, and bring the best of both worlds to the creative user."
this sounds interesting....i hope they dont creat an Audiomulch rip off
ReplyDeleteI think it sounds normal. As usual all the talk is of making new tools... The existing ones don't work yet - not reliably, and any punter in the crowd will tell you that reliable equipment is of paramount importance, especially if you ask them while the speakers are silent during the latest crash of your PC...
ReplyDeleteBack in the days of trackers, everyone could see that computers definitely had potential, but they were not widely adopted as musical instruments primarily as a result of the lack of available processing power. (IE lack of flexibility and audio quality)
As PC's evolved, computer music became more practical and in the mid 90's it really exploded... But now that the lack of power issue had been addressed, another issue arose - reliability. And pretty much nothing has been done about it. In fact I don't know of anyone even acknowledging it. The industry generally just sits around waiting for the OS' to get better.
A prime example is USB. The audio and video industries should never have allowed USB to become acceptable. Sure USB 2 is fast enough that in most cases it compensates for it's polling and bus contention issues, but they are still there, and they are a problem.
The cry always comes back that the biggest problems arise as a result of interaction between drivers, os, apps, and plugins, which are of course all manufactured by different companies. I don't think that's an excuse, in fact I think that it's the answer. Those companies need to be working together - and not to develop a new money spinner, but to fix the existing ones.
Like I said on CDM when this was posted there last week...
I’d just like to hear news that goes “Just in: Ableton, C74, RME and Microsoft release 99.999% uptime DAW with 12% speed increase over standard installations on XP” instead of the usual “Newsflash: New version of our software has cool new features.”
We got by with drums and sticks for a few millennia, I think we could survive without a new featureset for a year while the industry gets it's shit together and stops competing where they could be combining their strengths to change the industry for the better of the musicians and music lovers.
In the meantime I'm strictly hardware.
Both Max & Live have been rock solid since their beginings. My experience with Max dates back to when it was first ported to the Macintosh.
ReplyDeleteBoth applications are well written and neither are blotted or CPU hungry.
One can speculate on many things but not the quality of either product.
Robert Henke is Monolake. This could be awesome, because both tools could focus on merging thier respective strong points.
ReplyDeleteA modular version of Live maybe?
Like I said:
ReplyDelete"The cry always comes back that the biggest problems arise as a result of interaction between drivers, os, apps, and plugins"
Just having a stable OS, or stable drivers, or stable apps, or stable plugins, is NOT enough.
Did you actually read the whole comment or did you just not get it?
haha, gotta love someone how quotes themselves twice~!
ReplyDelete"Did you actually read the whole comment or did you just not get it?"
ReplyDeleteI just assumed you were either a Wintel user or had only used badly (k)'d versions of software.
Don't worry I got it.
Max/MSP + Jitter crashes way too much for me.
ReplyDeleteI don't use it much anymore. I just get sad when it crashes.
I rate its stability as poor, in my experience.