loop production environment instead of "LIVE" MAC?

[KingFish]

Well I'm workin on the Mac all week, and for the next week, I usually do loop based pre-production in ACID on a PC, render my work, import it into Pro-tools, and continue building my pre-pro session from there, to take into the studio, and Cut Bed's to, with "The Boys."

I was riiping through some empty Digi boxes, and came across the Ableton Live CD that came with one of my pro-tools rigs, and thoght I'd give it a spin.

I'm not crazy about it for the following reasons...

1. the inabillity to Consolodate, or "Join" multiple regions.

If i have a 1 bar loop that I've created by chopping, editing etc... with several selectable regions within that bar, it becomes too easy to screw up duplicating across the grid.

the only way to make a consolodated 1 bar region of your creation, is to solo the track bounce it to disk, and re import it.

2. a long time Pro-tools user... I find the Playback Cursor really un-intuative.

when highlighting a region in the edit window, I'd like to Hit may spacebar, and playback the region i have selected, that I'm working on.

With Ableton, when you want the playback cursor to play, from a location on the timeline, you need to go to the top of the edit window, above the session, and place the "Playback Cursor Flag" where you want it. Further, if you want to play a specific region length, you need to go above the edit window, drag the "Loop Start Flag" to the beginning of the region, the "loop end Flag" to the end of the region, then drag the "Playback Cursor Flag" to the same location as your "Loop Start Flag"

YUCK, my work flow constantly grinds to a halt, as I'm manually setting up 3 palyback parameters above the edit window, to audiotion the Bar I just worked on.

Again, it would just make way more sense fro playback to play the timeline across whatever region you currently have selected in the edit window.

3rd. Global session "Key Changes" across the timeline do not exists, you have to specify pitch shift, for each region at a "keychange point" in your song.

Acid is quick, powerfull, intuative, and completely unavailable for Mac.

Anything else I should try???

Not interested in Stylus, or "sample player" type plugins.. looking for another "loop based, timeline grid editing based Production environment" preferably that is a rewire client, but I'm willing to try stand alone apps as well.

Obvioustly looking for apps that have a functional time based trial / demo period, that i can download, for Mac OS X only.

Thanks