Ableton Halt Dev For Bug Fixes

In a rather honest post over on the Ableton Forum by CEO Gerhardt  Behles, an apology has been issued to users of Live 8:

Some of you have experienced and reported problems with Live 8 several months ago that we have still failed to fix. This is both painful and necessary for us to discuss. We owe you sincere apologies, as well as an explanation and outlook for the future. 

The post goes on:

Ableton values quality over innovation. Our engineers will stop whatever they are doing to fix a bug when they become aware of it. They must, however, rely on a process that prepares the incoming information and funnels it to them appropriately. Establishing and maintaining this process is the responsibility of management -- particularly us, Bernd and Gerhard -- and this is where things have gone wrong while we let our attention divert to ambitious new projects.

Our apologies also extend to both the Ableton developers and tech support colleagues because they want to be proud of software and service that users love.

We have now decided to:

• suspend all development towards new features while the whole team joins forces to address the current issues. This effort is open ended and will result in a free Live 8 update;
• make process changes to prevent similar situations from happening in the future.

We hope this plan finds your understanding and agreement. We'd like to wish you a very happy holiday season and a wonderful 2010!

Gerhard Behles, CEO

Quite an unusual and refreshingly honest post.  Especially important that they iron out any bugs with the recent and major inclusion of Max for Live. Up to now, their record has been exceedingly good. 

More Information

• Ableton.com

yeah, honest, but a bit late, I had major problems with Live version 7 (and 8), mostly sync and midi timing related. I still use Live for recording (but not for mixing) as it is very quick to setup routings and map midi controllers, as well as for occasional sound processing. But composing, not anymore! I bought akai mpc1k for sequencing and sampling and its perfect, rock solid timing and I can finally concentrate on music and not be a full time computer tech. maybe in a few years I'll buy a new computer and will upgrade to M4L. but the fact is - I don't have to spend 1/1.5k on computer every two years anymore!!! I better spend money on euro modules and not on stuff that becomes obsolete after a while. Anyway, good move, Gerhardt. Live is still the best software out there for composing and playing live, actually, the only real solution for playing live with computers.

30-Dec-09 04:31 AM

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