Tension was in the air at 11:AM this morning (ok, actually video cameras were in the air) as Ableton made their big version 8.0 upgrade announcement. Here's whatcha need to know... - bigger, badder warp engine that lets you adjust warp markers live on-ye-fly. They did a pretty impressive demo where a vocal track got stretched 'n' squashed live before your eyes. - new Looper instrument that works just like the dedicated floorbox ones. - new Vocoder, Multiband Dynamics, Overdrive, Limiter and Frequency Shifter effects. - tons of sound library additions. - new "groove engine" that lets you easily extract feels and imbue them on other audio. - new "Collision and Corpus" a physical-modeling instrument for mallet percussion sounds (cue sound of Zappa fans rejoicing). - lots of new tricks for the "Operator" synth including improved mod routing and additive wavetable synthesis. But the "real big news" is that Ableton and Akai have co-developed this superfly control surface exclusively for Live: Whoa, right? All those Monome-ish buttons have tri-color LED's, and let you turn clips on and off. All the other sliders and buttons do the standard mute/solo/mixer/tranport/crossfader type stuff. It's gonna include a custom-tailored version of Live, and the whole package will be just $399. The lovely lady at Akai tells us it'll be out in May. But there's STILL more... Ableton's partnering up with Cycling '74 with "Max for Live". This gives MAX/MSP object functionality inside Live 8 objects, and should be a BIG hit with the cutting edge electro crowd. This should be out uh, "later in '09" they're sayin'. Finally, Ableton introduced a "Share Live Sets" feature which lets users share song files over the web by assigning projects a unique URL for sharing, and lets the song "owner" give access privlileges to others. Finally, it's smart- it only copies files that the collaborators don't already have, which should speed things up when going back and forth on a project. That'd be "later in '09" too. All in all, a good time to be an Ableton Live user (btw, us Logic users got, uh, nothin'. Apple isn't even at NAMM. Doh.).