Friday, March 12, 2010

MU For Lemur: Jazzmutant gets completely in touch with Ableton Live

Thanks to the integration of MAX for Live, the doors into the inner workings of Ableton have been opened to the world. Jazzmutant has seized this opportunity with gusto, introducing MU - a complete integration of Ableton Live for their groundbreaking and award winning LEMUR multitouch controller (Jazzmutant was recently elected #1 for innovation of the decade & #5 for best performance gear by Futuremusic magazine). The Lemur and Ableton are tailor made for each other, and MU finally makes possible what I believe most Ableton users have wanted to do since their first experience with Live; throw aside their knob and fader boxes, put the mouse out of it's misery, and just reach out and touch the screen. Ableton's interface has been begging to be reached-out-and-touched since it was born, but musicians have only been able to do it indirectly with a large degree of compromise using hardware controllers. Although Jazzmutant's Dexter hardware (now a software upgrade to the Lemur) was an attempt to tightly integrate popular DAWS such as LOGIC and CUBASE, likely because of limitations of access to the nuts and bolts of the software it was always with a degree of "almost there". Now with MU, the Lemur is doing what it was born to do, quickly and effortlessly providing a complete software interface that you just reach out and touch. The beta version is available now through Jazzmutant's website, note that Max for Live is required.