One year later I’m still a big fan, although I’ve had some ups and downs.
The good:
- Live integration. You can drag individual tracks or devices out of Ableton Cloud, so it’s surprisingly easy to use Move Standalone as a module within your set. I’m not explaining it super well so let me know if you have any questions.
- Randomized presets with every new set — I really, really like this. If you get a bad roll, just delete the set and start over!
- Portability.
- Quick sampling. Especially compared to Push, where you have to record an audio clip and convert it to a new sampler track.
- The step sequencer. Even though Push has basically the same capabilities (and more), it’s nice having the dedicated buttons.
- The Undo function actually tells you what you undid!
- Capture works heads and tails better than it does in Live.
- With full access to Drift in beta 1.7, this is a surprisingly powerful synth and sampler.
- Generous storage (50 GB) and RAM (2 GB). You really don’t need to think about it.
The maybe-bad (YMMV):
- Over time, the workflow has moved further away from both Note and Push. This won’t bother everybody, and in fairness a lot of the changes are better for the form factor, but I hoped that Move would at least maintain the same muscle memory as Push. It’s not miles away, but I make mistakes when I switch back and forth.
- Some of the new Shift functions have become unintuitive and less discoverable. Shift+Track to access MIDI makes perfect sense, but I’m not a fan of the submenus you access via the jogwheel (Drum Sampler pg 2, sample slice/reverse, Drift banks in beta 1.7).
- Most of the preset macros are relatively consistent, but I still spend a fair bit of time tapping the tops of the knobs, looking for a certain parameter.
- Controller Mode is good to have, but very different from both Move Standalone and Push. I find it very hard to move back and forth.
All in all I think it’s excellent value and I’m very happy with it. Given the choice between Move and Push, I’d take Push hands-down — but that’s an extremely unfair comparison given the huge differences in price, size, and general intent.