ABLETON LIVE VS PRIME | Which one is right for your worship ministry?

In this video, I compare Prime by Loop Community with Ableton Live. A lot of worship leaders ask which one is right for them. It depends a lot on how much control and capability you need out of your tracks software. Prime is easy to use by lacks the advanced features of Ableton Live. Ableton Live has the advanced features but can be challenging to learn.

[Chris-hfnr]

Jake, the timing on this video couldn't be more perfect! I am meeting with my pastor/leadership today to discuss both these options. Thank you for continuing to post valuable content on this subject!

[coolcat]

I have prime, playback, and Ableton suite. I honestly love the ease with prime. I’ve done clinics, and church training sessions abroad, and everyone seems to love prime.

[LRETV]

I love both apps. We use both weekly. I use prime in rehearsals because it's quick and easy. All the team can quickly load the set in prime since we do not use planning center. During service we use both also. Abelton during worship and prime for any quick songs that may be added last minute

[joserobertocastellon]

Thank you for what you do, Jake! I am very new to multi-tracks (under 2 weeks) and I am currently using Prime for my very, VERY small church. I am in the worship ministry, not the leader but I am responsible for the sound console, play the piano, and sing. When I learned about multi-tracks, I downloaded Prime and started to learn it and pitched it to my pastor. The whole ministry and church LOVED what we were able to achieve with it. Yesterday was our first time using it, we gave so much freedom to the Holy Spirit that even though we played about half the usual amount of songs, our worship time went up by an hour and we didn't even realize it! Because we are such a small church, a software like Ableton is currently out of the question, but Prime meets our current needs like a champ. My only gripe with Prime is that it's extremely buggy!! Right when starting, I was adjusting the volume on the iPad and the sound just cut off. I had to reload the app twice until I finally got it working. Another bug is when editing the segments. I wish there was an "undo" button and a cancel button. I thought using it on my Mac was going to be smoother, but it appeared to be a bad port instead. Trying to click between segments to place the playhead resulted in moving a perfectly edited segment and having to redo it. It is really frustrating, but the end result is SO WORTH IT!
SORRY for the rant, my initial intention was just to thank you for everything you teach us. I've learned a lot from you and I'm still contemplating Playback over Prime.

[jessiebautista]

Thank you for taking the time to explain all of this. Multi tracks have been kind of intimidating but after these comparison videos I feel loads better. Thanks again

[aaronfisher]

Jake, you may already know, but I wanted to add that the Prime developer has indicated that the next update to Prime should allow you to manually trigger the transitions (crossfade, overlap, etc.). Once that happens, you should be able to have a pad track running then use a midi controller or looptimus to fade into the next track whenever you are ready, which should help to smooth out transitions with Prime.

[lukejackson]

thank you for having the honorary Ron Swanson breakfast poster in your office. I approve.

[ScottGiorgini]

Great info as always, Jake! As you may remember, my church recently picked up a Midas M32 board and over the last few weeks, I've implemented the In Ear Monitor System (with the Behringer HA8000 Headphone Amp) and it's working like a BOSS! Next up... click and backing tracks. For that, we've decided to go with Prime for several reasons (in no particular order) >>
1. Cost: You can't beat free, and Prime does everything we need at our church. And even the tracks are $5 cheaper each when purchased for use with Prime.
2. Ease of use: I'm personally a techie guy. I've used Ableton in the past and have a cursory knowledge of how to get around/use the software. Our Worship Leader however, is NOT... and there might be somewhat of a learning curve for her to use it, whereas Prime is super intuitive and you can teach yourself pretty much anything you need to know by watching a few short tutorials and playing around with the app for a half hour.
3. Functionality: Yes... Running slides and lighting cues from the app would be great, and I really hope they do incorporate those features sometime down the line. But as for the situation at my church, well... it's basically an old Catholic Church with tons of windows, so we're running in bright daylight virtually 99% of the time we're there, so lighting isn't as big of a factor for us. They people who run our slides are pretty with it too, so no worries there. I'm looking forward to the release of the function that Aaron mentioned where you can skip to the next song and it will use your pre-selected transition, but until then, I would just jump to the end of the song by pushing that section on the iPad, then let that last bit play out and transition into the next song or pad.
4. Spontaneity: The Force is STRONG with our Worship Leader... That is to say, that she's typically very connected with the spirit when she leads, and may break into a free worship segment as the drop of a hat. These interludes are very powerful and as I'm the drummer, I can sit in the back of the stage and watch how deeply the congregation is touched by these moments. Sine our Worship Leader does not as of yet, own a Looptimus or similar midi control device, the easiest way for her to break into one of these sessions is to just tap the section to which she wants to jump on her iPad (and loop it if she so desires). And since the cues are dynamic, the band will easily know exactly where she's going.
Anywhoot... That's where we're at at the present time. Maybe we'll upgrade to Ableton in the future, maybe not... But for now, Prime has everything we need. ヅ

[anthonybrothers]

Loop Community just killed off their app for me. I chose Prime over Multitracks because it offered everything i needed without forcing a $10/m fee. They just came out with a "Pro" version at $10/m and nerfed the free version to useless. They went from giving a super generous 60GB of cloud storage to 300MB for free users, and set the $10/m Pro version at 25GB. And now, an app that has never crashed on me in 6 months, is super buggy and crashed on me within the first 3 min of use. This has wasted dozens and dozens of hours of work as I've built my library over the last 6 months. I finally got all of my songs in, and now it's useless because I will not pay $120 a year to be able to do everything I did for the last 6 months for $0.

[khurtsmom]

What’s the price difference between the two programs when buying tracks? And does ableton or multitracks talk like prime? I’ve only experienced prime, and have gotten quite used to it telling me when to come in.

[curtisbiswell]

I currently have the trial version of Ableton and am using that to learn and build my own tracks. On Sunday's I run prime. I only wish that Prime could crossfade to the next track when you push next. This is the only downside to me right now. I want to work towards using Ableton on Sunday's when I can get the funds and laptop to run them. In limbo right now but making the best of what I have.

[demac]

I'm using both, ableton if I've done all the tracking myself prime if I'm lazy and just want to play keys and not making all of the parts

[drummerboyjh]

Hey Jake thanks so much for all these videos I've been curious about using prime or if it would be something we could really benefit from I know when I used it a year or two ago it did not have very many features but we have used worship band in hand app for probably three to four years and it's been really helpful very quick and easy to use but limited they have recently added some other features but we've moved to playback app also which has some cool crossfade auto options and of course you're using original multi-tracks and they sound great but what I have found is that with the right iPad I can run band in hand worship pads while simultaneously running playback so I can have my pads for the keys of the song's playing before and after, and it's been rock solid even though it's not meant to do it, it works great and you can even go in and out of the apps without any problem so far. Question do you use Loop Community songs for the prime app I find a lot of those not to be very good quality or don't sound very good?.Thanks again. I will also add that we're a church of about 160 people and down to three musicians I am on drums running 2 ipads one for backing tracks and one other to help run our digital mixer for making adjustments when the sound guy is not there, keyboard player which leads the singing, an acoustic guitar player who we don't always have around to play for us so we use quite a few of the individual tracks of each song for what we do. Thanks again

[gsauto]

I’m just getting started in this so when you say running a click in tracks what do you mean. The click is obviously the tempo beat and the track is the song? So can you play the track over the Soundsystem also? Sometimes we don’t have a drummer available so I would like to be able to run a drum track. Are you able to play it so that the congregation can hear it also?

[InstallationMan]

Hi Jake,

Are you running the Standard version for your worship band?

[jeraldbrianrelos]

Hey Jake, what's that song in the intro of this vid?