With the added bonus of a heap of built-in instruments and effects, the ability to host plugins and an intuitive MIDI learn function, Live makes an unbeatable one-stop-shop for electronic musicians. It’s this view, along with the intuitive way that Live handles retiming audio, that makes the DAW a fantastic tool for blurring the lines between DJing and live performance. Key to its popularity with DJs is the Session View - a brilliantly implemented and cleanly designed window for launching sync’d audio samples, MIDI clips and tracks.
Still, while it may have been first envisioned purely as a production tool, in the years since its inception Live has become a favourite of DJs across the world. Ableton Live is something of an anomaly in this list, due to the fact that it’s not really a true DJ application - or at least it wasn’t originally imagined as such.
