I started learning Live after applying for a job interview at Ableton. At that point I had only known what Live was but I never touched it and never had an interest in music making. I downloaded the trial version and after just a couple of hours familiarizing myself with it, I was addicted. I never got the job, but I still open up Live when I'm bored to tinker around.

Here's what stands out to me:

  - Session view is great for experimenting with different arrangements and samples using the same processing chain without having to scroll through a huge timeline of different ideas. You can then go to arrangement view to work on your final arrangement.

  - Almost everything that you create is reusable. You can string together an instrument and/or a bunch of effects, group them together, map each their controls to a unified (and smaller) set of controls, and now you have a new instrument that you can drag and drop later on. You can then chain and group those together as well.

  - Max4Live is to plugins as Flash was to games. There are a ton of weird and experimental M4L devices out there available for free or for a very small price.

There are some negatives though:

  - As others have mentioned, it is pricey, $750 as of today if you want the complete version with all their instruments and effects.

  - Bouncing (re-recording) to a new track or to a file is a bit convoluted. Furthermore, bounced samples are encrypted in Ableton's proprietary format which means you can't use samples that YOU created in other plugins easily. There are a few workarounds that I found but it's just a frustrating experience. This also applies to any sample packs that come with Live or from Ableton's shop, you can't use them outside of Live's inbuilt devices or M4L devices. Again, there are workarounds but it's frustrating and there's probably something in the fine print against it.

  - No facilities for batch exporting sample slices. Say you want to use Live to process some sound effects and export them to individual files, well you can't do that easily in Live. There's a paid M4L device out there that helps with this but I just use Reaper to do this now.