Setting Up Basic Preference To Get You Started

How to set up the basic prefeneces in Live

This will go through just the BASIC preferences when starting out. Not all of them.

Look/Feel Tab
If your reading this i assume you'll be using the English language. But I guess pick what you want!

Go down to the zoom display and set up accordingly, I use 86% It gives me a good view of everything without being too small but this will all depend on the resolution of your monitor.

Now in the colors section click the "Skin" drop menu. Pick to taste. There is a good selection.

Audio Tab
In the driver type drop menu choose the driver type, in all honesty I'd recommend downloading ASIO or ASIO4ALL, this will allow you to have multiple prgrams running on the same audio card.

For Audio input, select your input device (microphone, AUX, etc) or keep it on No Input if you don't plan on working with incoming audio.

For Audio Out, choose your audio card and option that is stated "speakers" or "output"

In the sample rate I'd set that at 44100Hz, this is the standard and the sample rate for CDs, 48000Hz is used for DVDs.

Not all of you might be able to acces all the controls in the latency section, this depends on your soundcard.

The buffer size is the amount of time it take for the audio to go in or out of live or how long it'll proccess the audio, the smaller, the less time it'll so the lower quality, but a very low latency, and very high will give you a high quality sound but high latency, so you need to find happy medium.

(For a detailed step by step tutorial on how to opto=mize your audio input/output go to View > Help View and in the Help Pane in the Setup section click "Learn how to setup your audio hardware"

A quick way is to go down to the "Test" section, click the test tone on and drop your output buffer size untill it gets really distorted and slowly bring it up until it goes away.

Ableton recommends you round it to a "binary round number" 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, and so on, just round in to which ever is closest and still not having no distortion.

MIDI / Sync
Ok I'm going to reffer you to the help section get through this, just because I only have experience using an xBox controller and a UMX250, so go to View > Help View and in the Help pane, under the Setup section, click "Learn how to set up your MIDI hardware" This will teach you everything you need to know and will go through it step by step.

File / Folder
Most of this by default will work prefectly fine.

If your new to live you most likely won't be using Max for Live, if you are, please reffer to the Max for Live section in the forum.

The only one we will look at now is "Plug-In Sources" turn on the VST Plug-In Custom Folder and click browse and find yout folder with all your VST Plug-Ins, I would recommend keeping ALL your VSTs for all programs in one folder.

Now all the other tabs and setting will do just fine at the default settings to get you started.

If you have any questions about any of these additional settings feel free to ask! I'll explain them with as much detail as possible.