Ableton 10 is here!

To say that Ableton 10 is "Long awaited" is very much an understatement.
All updates after version 9 have been frustratingly slow and very incremental. 
And then out of the blue a few weeks back, we saw Ableton artist Jazzy Jeff sporting what looked to be a subtly different version of the groundbreaking DAW.
Some speculated that he was just using one of the many skins that you can get for Ableton.
And it was all purely aesthetic. But some very astute members of the Ableton community knew better, They saw that things were off, and that what they were seeing was in fact a new incarnation of Live.
Fast forward to now, and we can see that their suspicions were well founded.
So before you all frantically leave this page and start scouring the web for the upgrade path, just hold ya horses.
This version is only available to BETA testers at present, with the release date unavailable to us mere mortals until Q1 2018, Let's hope it's earlier!
The good news is that if you buy Live 9 now, version 10 will be a free upgrade upon its release. Nice.

I wont bore you with all the obvious upgrade details, like the new synth, the new effects and the new workflow features. (see the video for all of those).

I will instead focus on the "under the hood" type features. like the fact that It is now possible to export MP3, FLAC and WAVPACK! 
Finally! And I mean FINALLY! 
Considering that Live has been the "go to" DAW for DJs who do edits and mash-ups, (and of course their own original material), for gigs and soundcloud shares, I always thought not having this as a feature many versions ago was particularly perplexing. Bouncing out to WAV or AIFF and then converting to MP3 always seemed like an unnecessary step. 
I mean even Logic and Studio One have been able to bounce as MP3 for ages!

Sure, you may not consider bouncing to MP3 and FLACC as a "pro feature" but it sits nicely in Ableton's ideal of being a super fast creative tool that you can create with and then quickly bounce out your work to the format required.
One could argue that with the ever increasing hard drive capacities available to us for cheaper and cheaper prices that bouncing to a compressed file format may be a bit redundant, but the MP3 is still a long way from being dead, and having this feature is a great if not a long overdue addition to the software.
A couple of other neat features are things like, automatically timestamping new recorded audio, and saving all undo histories with the project when closing. This also means that these will also be recoverable after a crash.

It's these kind of features that really show that Ableton is treating itself like a fully professional DAW. And let's face it we'd be kidding ourselves if we thought of it as anything less than this. I mean most of the hits out there are made with Ableton or at the very least start their life a an Ableton demo.

To get down to the real nitty gritty of all the new features, you can go here

This update is a lot more than just adding on a few new "bells and whistles", this is a statement to the audio world that Live is serious about what it does and is growing with the needs of it's users and artists. 
It may not look it if at first glance, but this update is huge!