New Effects and Preset Modules: Along with Live's already impressive collection of audio effects and instruments you will find some new ones.

• "Saturator" is a nifty distortion plug-in that will add anything from subtle grit to nasty fuzz to your sounds. Choose between "Clip", "Soft", "Medium", "Hard" and "Sine" distortion modes and add flavour by using the "Color" EQ section.

• "Beat Repeat" will satisfy the needs of the glitch-heads and IDM noodlers out there with John Cage-eque slice'n'dice functions. Set the "Interval" parameter to determine how often it will slice up your sounds, and apply a certain percentage of "Chance" to determine how random the slicing happens. Bleeps and bloops can then be detuned, filtered and gated all within this plug-in, allowing for some crazy stuttering beats and metallic robot noises.

• Other new effects include "Auto-Pan", "Flanger" and "Phaser" (guess what they do.) Also worth note, the "Simpler" sampler has been tweaked for better flexibility.

Live5's native effects and instruments can now be loaded and saved in preset grouped modules. This basically allows the user to call up a channel strip with any combination of effects and instruments that have their own presets AS a group. For example, the Effect Group "Atmosphazer" calls up a Phaser, Filter Delay and Compressor with settings that will make the sounds swirl around your head (take some Gravol for that one). "Radio Gaga" inserts a Saturator set to "Medium", an EQ Three with the lows cut, and another Saturator set to "Hard" for some very colourful high-end noise.

This feature especially comes in handy when using Live's native virtual instruments. Impulse, Simpler and Operator each have presets that mix'n'match the instruments with various effects - drum kits in Impulse load with compressors, Operator and Simpler presets are sweetened up with delays and other nifty effects. You can even make your own groups by shift-clicking all the effects in one channel, then either a left-click or a hot-key to "Group Devices". This will however only work on Live5's native effects, but with the wide range of effects and instruments at your finger tips the possibilities are endless.

As if the flexibility of preset channels with grouped effects wasn't enough, you can also bundle together Audio and MIDI clips WITH the effect groups. Take a crusty old loop that you've used to death on other tracks, run it through some filters and effects, automate those effects within the clip, change the timing - and then store all that as one clip by simply dragging the clip into the browser window. Now you can call up that loop AND the effects you used on it for anything you create in the future with Live5. The same goes for MIDI - program a beat or riff on your favourite Impulse kit or Operator patch, insert some MIDI effects like "Arpeggiator" or "Scale", and those patterns can be stored with their respective virtual instrument and effects. No more having the bounce to audio and hope it will Warp properly for a future project.

Launchable Locate Points and Scrubbing: This is one of the new additions that made me shout "Finally!" as opposed to "Again?". In one of the previous upgrades, Live somehow lost the ability to jump around the timeline without finding and grabbing the arrow-shaped "start" locator; you used to be able to mouse-over the timeline at the top of the Arrangement and drop the arrow where ever you wanted, while playing back your session. Now mousing-over the top of the arrange will give you a Speaker icon allowing you to click on the timeline to restart playback on the next Quantization for seamless playback. Turn off Global Quantization and you get Scrubbing.

Live5 has introduced Locate Points that can be punched in on the fly using the "Set" button to the right of the timeline. You can jump to the points on the time line using "previous" and "next" arrows located next to "Set" button, but more conveniently these "Set", "Jump" buttons and each of the Locator themselves can be assigned to QWERTY keys or MIDI notes. In true Live fashion, jumping to Locators during playback will lock to whatever the Global Quantization is set to. Very handy as both a DAW and live performance tool.

That much closer to DAWs: Multi-tracking audio with realtime effects; full automation on the arrange page; preset channel strips; locate points and scrubbing - sounds like a pretty serious DAW now, not just another little loopy program, don't it? But there was always one major obstacle that kept Ableton Live from competing with the big-boy sequencer, it's handling of DSP. For example, on the Mac, Live was never "Altivec Enhanced" to take advantage of the G4's processing power. Ableton admitted this was something that Live would never people to do, because of the amount of re-coding they'd have to do for the program. There was also the consensus that such a feature wouldn't make that big a difference - although anyone who owns Logic, Cubase, Digital Performer or Sonar can test how many plug-ins they can get going in those programs as opposed to Live.

Well now Live5 has introduced one of the most popular features found in other programs - the ability to "Freeze" tracks. Tracks can be frozen on the Arrange Page, like most other programs this includes audio channels with effects and tracks with virtual instruments. However, Live5 still has that nifty "Session" view where clips can be launched and looped indefinitely, that feature which sets it apart from other programs. How can the "Freeze" function possibly cope with multiple clips on one channel? Well - it freezes ALL of them, so they can STILL be triggered on and off as you would want to when they're un-frozen. When you go to lay down those clips in realtime performance record mode (hit record then start triggering clips) the Freeze will be disable, but Live Freezes tracks so quick and smoothly it hardly puts a dent in your workflow. Add to this the fact that Live now offers plug-in delay compensation and you might start asking yourself why you'd use any other program.

By now I must seem a little biased to this program, and I admit, I am. Initially, I was a non-believer - when the first version of Live came into our store, I scoffed. "Great, another Sonic Foundry Acid knock-off program," I thought. But the moment I started using it I began to understand the power of the program, it's flexibility and the shift in my entire workflow. Ever since I've been using the program more and more, relying less on other programs.

If you want to see how myself and other sound creators have adapted Ableton Live5 to suit their specific needs, join us on Thursday October ---th @ 6:30?PM for a full demonstration of the new features, plus some other gems you probably never knew existed. See you there!

Ableton Live5's Arrange Page - note how Track 3 is "frozen" blue.