Logic pro 11 vs Ableton 12 - which one to you other and why?

[BeyondAntares]

I'm a logic user but have seen growing interest in Ableton 12. I have Ableton 12 lite and thinking should I make a switch.

What's the forum's opinion on these two, do you like the changes and which ones do you prefer?

 

[GunpointMetal]

I can fell my way through almost any DAW except Ableton. Everything feels backward (and looks backward). I think if I was doing electronic music I might try harder to learn it, but for integrating live instruments in a recording process, I hate it. It's definitely worth giving it a shot. One of my bandmates uses it for all kinds of cool stuff.

 

[slaws]

I like Ableton as a writing tool. Using the session view I record riffs into different clips and do a bunch of mixing and matching with different drum clips and whatnot. If I were recording already completed songs I would probably go with a more traditional daw. But if I'm just writing parts, Ableton is my go to.

 

[SpinalTap]

I remember Adam Neeley saying he uses Ableton because you can automate everything.

 

[prosteve]

The best thing about Ableton is Max for Live. If you aren’t going to use that it’s basically like any other DAW. I own 4 or 5 full suits of DAWs. Logic is my favorite. It has some of the fun sessions features that Ableton has while being a much better writing tool, in my opinion.

 

[budda]

A friend let me try ableton with his info and I got maybe 20m into it before I stopped. Big fan of the logic layout and flow, but I am not trying to do anything big. Previous daws were audacity, reaper and garageband in that order.

 

[Metallica35]

I much prefer Ableton. I find nothing intuitive or 'logical' about Logic. The way the playhead behaves in Ableton just makes way more sense to me. If i click a spot, it starts playback from that spot. In Logic, I felt like I had to constantly remember to use the Marquee tool for things like this, and it just slowed me down. Logic also doesn't like to restart playback from the same location without the Marquee tool. Ableton restarts from the same spot by default. So you can just click record, track, and if you screw up, just hit record again.

Logic also doesn't compensate for latency at all. You have to put it in 'low latency mode' while tracking. Ableton just natively calculates the latency and adjusts your recorded audio accordingly. So, if there's 50ms of playback latency, you can still track a new piece of audio with all your plugins enabled, and it'll just shift it back 50ms automatically after you hit pause so that it sits properly in-line with the rest of the project. Little things like that add up, and they really slow me down in Logic. I feel that I can focus on the actual music in Ableton without having to constantly google around to figure out how to do basic things. I load up my template set, which has all my guitar/bass/drum/vocal effects chains set up, and I can leave it all enabled. I just load the set, hit record, and start tracking!

The only weird thing in Ableton is the session versus arrangement view. I basically just use the Arrangement view all the time. I just switch back to session to view the mixer. I now have multiple monitors, so I can see both at all times.

 

[Moongrum]

I would never want to beholden to one os for my daw, so I would personally not use logic.
This thread is a bit old, but OP if you decide to buy Ableton, buy the upgrade for lite from Thomann, it's the cheapest there. Standard is only $188, and Suite is $475.