I would love to hear more about your experiences with the two. Have you upgraded to Live 7 as of yet? I really like the way the new mix engine sounds and its re-vamped compressor is really good sounding in addition to being a minor hit to the CPU. I am contemplating the purchase of a Mac Pro sometime soon (I still use a G4 Powerbook) and often think of having it bundled with Logic. Ableton is a hell of a scratch-pad but, I understand Logic or DP is the way to go when finalizing one's work.....at least that was the case until 7 came out. I have been real happy with it and am not 100% sure of the necessity for the move to Logic. I hate learning curves when taking on a new program.


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Live is phenomenal for linear editing if you pay attention to gain structures, etc. I've used a bunch of different programs all the way back to old school Cubase, SONAR, and Cakewalk. Nothing yet that I've seen can do what Live does if you have the patience to dig deep into the program.

The clipping is probably a matter of the manner in which you mix in Live - because of its dithering and summing capabilities it can trick the ear into thinking things sound better than than they really do. The acoustics of the room you compose/mix in, the headphones you use, the monitors you use, etc - these will all color the sound and with Live's new audio engine masking a lot of those transients it is a temptation to run it into the red because it still sounds "good."

Carl is on the money when it comes to mixing in Live - you really have to watch the levels across the board and keep the master completely out of the red to get a good clean mix then put the tracks to the mixing and mastering test after that.

Its absolutely possible to get quality, clean mixes out of Live without the need to dump files into another daw for mixdown. As long as use your warp mode correctly and use high quality oversampling modes for the eqs (or use quality 3rd party ones) then you're ok.
Logic has a very immediate crispy clean sound right from the get go. But it also sounds very much "Like Logic". Almost too clean, Imo.
It just comes down to what you're most comfortable working with and how you usually work.
What I think is that Logic excells in Midi functionality but is very sub-par far using audio chunks and audio editing type of stuff. Where is, Live totally excells at anything having to do with audio but the midi functionality isn't quite as good. It's tight for sure. But just dosnt have alot of the same functionality as some other daws.
I also think that Logics sequencer timeline and workflow is not as fast and intuitive as Live's. And definately not as fun to use either.