I spent a good bit of the weekend playing with the new versions of Ableton Live and Sound Forge.

They are both worthy upgrades, but Live needs a few bugfixes. It didn’t crash on me, but it was quirky to get some things synced up correctly. I dream of a possibly nonexistent future day when Live has a distortion plugin that is as cool as Reason’s Scream module. I have heard rumors of some good distortion VST’s, but they can get pretty pricey.

Sound Forge now supports plugin automation, and it’s a lot of fun to play with parameter envelopes outside the context of something like Acid. It’s a great tool for making loops and samples. My only beef with that program (so far) is the inane support for synchronizing recording to external midi devices. I actually haven’t gotten this to work, but I have a few more leads to try this week.