The following article is from one of the conference sessions at Winter Music Conference (WMC) last week in Miami, where the PowerPage was covering the mobile music scene, digital DJing and the pervasiveness of PowerBooks in the Electronic music community.

Miami -- Dave Hill, Jr. one of the foremost experts on Ableton and author of Ableton Live 2 Power took us on a journey through Live 5 showing us how to get the most out of the software.

Live is an audio creation, production and performance application used by electronic musicians like Sasha and Gabriel & Dresden. Live 5 is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that boasts a bunch of new features that add to its creation, production and performance capabilities, including improvements in remix, organization, instruments and effects.

Dave mentioned that a Universal Binary version of Live (v.5.2) was announced at Winter NAMM in January and beta is now shipping, he also noted that Live 6 will add support for multicore/multiprocessor architectures like the dual core Intel processors and will be shipping in Q3. Dave went on to say that that Live 6 will offer twice the performance of version 5.

Dave and his colleague Jesse Terry displayed some of the new features of Live 5, including Freeze Tracks which frees up CPU power and eases the transfer of projects between computers by creating a rendered version of the track. It's essentially a runtime version that doesn't require the other user to have any special plug-ins installed.

Speaking of plug-ins, Dave cautioned that they should be used judiciously as they can lead to instability. One of the most popular questions that Dave gets is "what if it crashes?" Dave summed it up this way "Well, you can walk to work, or you can drive to work." He went on to say that proper auto maintenance is important to keeping it running smoothly and that if you don't take care of it, it'll break down. Dave was implying that the car was like your computer and if you use it to perform live, you need to take good care of your rig.

Live is an amazing tool for all types of digital musicians and I highly recommend that you give it a shot. Don't be intimidated by the feature set or power, there's incredible tutorials built in and you can learn tons by selecting View > Lessons. Live 5 is available for US$499 from Ableton.