has ableton gotten better at...

ableton forums are way too busy...

I'm still using version 5, haven't really cared about most of the new features, but been having 2 issues with it.

- really slow performance when doing lots of chops/cuts/slicing etc in the arrangement

- no way to quickly change presets (tied to a scene change, for example, rather than drag and drop) which makes it distracting to try to do some things live

has either of these gotten much better with the past few upgrades?

Not sure about how it is since 5, I used 5, but then moved to 6 and 7 when they came out.

Both issues could be resolved within the limitations though, for example, you can use a different program/VST to do cuts/slicing (I assume you mean for audio files), like LiveSlice, also, Ableton Live 7 has a drum rack which could work well to chop some samples up.

In terms of changing presets, you can just use the automation track to make it slide to the different preset, not only would that flow better but then you wouldn't have the problem at all!

for the preset thing, I want to trigger them rather than sequence them... I guess maybe I could loop different parts of the arrange and hit the back to arrange button to change...

was talking more about editing kind of slicing, I have tools for realtime. if protools free worked on os x I would just use that. but yeah, I realize there are workarounds, just trying to figure out if I would still need them after upgrading.

Oh man, Ableton has gotten so much better. They just keep improving that program. If you're still using version 5, upgrade.