Is there anything else for creative composing along the lines of Ableton Live? The session views make a lot of sense. It's a nice program. And ultimately I believe professional music can be make on any software, especially Live/Logic/Reason/etc.
I ask because I'm locked into Logic due to my hardware constraints and my actual physical studio–I record a lot of serious audio (32 audio tracks at a time sometimes) and need Logic's very mature audio editing engine.
However, on a personal level, I'm composing a lot of electronic music, DnB (old Aphex Twin stuff :), so let's just say "EDM". And Live makes that a lot easier.
The thing is, Ableton's pricing structure is totally out of whack.
The entire Logic Pro X package–the FULL package–sells for $200. That's with far more instruments and effects, a huge sample library, and a much mature editing system, so on and so forth. Ableton just has this jazzy tab button thing going for it. I guess I could get over it, but still.
Ableton sells a dumbed down version with barely anything for $99, and then their "standard" version is $450, and the real standard version (which they call "suite") is $750! Suite mainly just comes with Max for Live, which is a free license (for personal use) piece of software anyway, so Ableton seems to be taking advantage of something... probably EDM's peak in commercialization right now. Oh well, karma... It won't last long.
Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions on sequencers or other apps with interfaces that are great for putting together beats/sections/grooves and even arrangements in a more intuitive way than the standard sequencer arrange view (kinda like Live's Session view, but not so expensive), please let me know... Even something with a more modern interface like Live would help (Logic is a bit long in the tooth, not that I'd go with anything else for recording a serious session besides Pro Tools, and its plugin architecture is outdated among other things).