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Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I've used both extensively.

They share some qualities, but as the name suggests, Ableton Live is really geared towards live performance use. Logic is more for straight-up production. I mean, people use Ableton Live for production, but I think Logic is more flexible overall. (Because it's simpler, though, Live may be friendlier for people just getting into digital audio production.)

Also, just check out the interfaces: Logic is more for precision work, Ableton is all about getting to your actions quickly, as would be super-necessary when performing live and every millisecond counts.

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I disagree. Live started as performance and it is often presented as such, but its studio workflow is not a second class citizen at all. In fact the general workflow is one of Live's strong points. I spent a lot of time with both Live and Logic and I rarely used complex software that is as intuitive as Live. In my opinion everything in Live is where you'd expect it to be. Devices are plain and straight forward, no brushed steel backgrounds or cluttered "science fiction interfaces".

This accessibility made switch to Live (again) after several years of Logic usage. You'll get great results with both, but after all I realized I value Ableton's straight forward workflow.

And then there's also Max 4 Live, which enables a whole other world of extensibility and tweaking.

The only thing I miss is Logic's low latency mode which is useful if your project becomes big and you need to record another track late in the production progress.

|The only thing I miss is Logic's low latency mode which is useful if your project becomes big and you need to record another track late in the production progress.|

To do this you can "freeze" a collection of tracks in Live. It essentially locks every action you've applied to a track (and perhaps even quietly renders them to temp WAVs) in order to free up computing power.

Of course I know about freezing, but low latency mode just bypassed several resource heavy effects/instruments with the click of a button - no rendering time, or (un)freezing required. It worked very well.

Since the later 8.x versions, Live has had a "reduced latency when monitoring" option which allows you to do just that.

I must have missed that - thanks, I'll look into it.

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