Funny! I think fl studio ui is the worst, ableton is better than fl, and bitwig much better than both. I guess it really is just personal preference or maybe we mistake familiarity for ergonomics because we build muscle memory for tools and then if we try anything else, it'll obviously feel worse because we don't know how it works.
> I guess it really is just personal preference or maybe we mistake familiarity for ergonomics
These are mutually exclusive the way I see it, and I would argue that personal preference is the right one.
I tried learning Ableton but didn't find joy in it, I think it's because FL Studio has closer origins to the music tracker days whereas Ableton avoided that.
I would say they both offer different mental modes that are orthogonal to one another
For me it was through comparison I realized this. I used some other DAWs and found Ableton to just make sense. They jam so much into a simple UI that it all just makes sense.
I moved from Ableton Live to Bitwig and found Bitwig's interface even more intuitive than Live's. There are some idiosyncrasies in Live's UI that aren't hard to learn but definitely non-intuitive, in my opinion Bitwig has a more polished experience for interaction/intuitiveness.
Modulators [0], for example, they are available as a side-panel on any device which you can click the rectangle with a "+" button and select any type of modulator: LFOs (many different kinds), curves, envelopes, segments, etc.
Instead of creating a LFO as part of the chain of devices it's clearly a thing embedded to the device itself, including on VSTs (so any VST can have more complex modulation than they offer natively). You can multi-target the modulator to affect any parameter on any of the devices across the whole track, so a LFO modulating something on the 1st device in the chain can also apply the same modulation to a parameter on the 9th device so they can be "coupled" to that movement, this mapping is also attenuated per application so even though the movement is the same it can have different magnitudes when assigned.
It completely removes the need of LFO Tool for complex curves/ramps, etc., or the LFO as a device with the "map" button to assign to parameters, if I want 10 LFOs I can just have them all together as a side-pane of a device or the track itself. It makes much more sense that a modulator is attached to something instead of being its own thing on a long list of devices.
Another improvement: macros can live on a control panel for a device, whole track, or even the whole project, so you can create a macro knob at the project-level and map it to affect any parameter of any track, and just map the project-level macro knob to a MIDI controller to modulate whatever parameter in the whole project.
These are just a couple of intuitive features from the top of my head I use in almost every single project.
Quick edit: another feature I remembered after writing this comment that I find more intuitive is the creation of control pages for a device, it's accessible right below the "modulators" button and opens a side-pane to create up to 8 control knobs mapped directly to a device's/VST's parameter or even mapped to a "macro" modulator which itself can be mapped to many parameters of a device/VST, it's really intuitive to create pages of these controls and only use the controls themselves to change parameters, I barely open the VST window after experimenting a bit with which parameters I want to play with and mapping those to controls.
I love that it is not only clean and usable, but also they somehow managed to make it cool in a very minimalist and utilitarian way. It is like a digital version of a sleek physical synth with very raw industrial design. Reminds me of how NAD amplifiers look ugly-beautiful with their greyish chases.
i just like that theres a damn plugin rack at the bottom. most other DAW's i can't stand how i have to click some tiny little button to see the plugin window. its nice to be able to tweak knobs on different plugins in your chain easily
Counterpoint: the UI is usable but ugly. Logic Pro does a better job of clean UI while maintaining the OS look, more or less, and still being very usable and flexible in a similar creative space. I love both programs but I "feel" better in Logic.
Can you elaborate on the AI powered workflow(s) you'd like to see in Ableton? As a creative I'm quite averse to AI integration in tools like this but as a technology enthusiast I do see a future where AI can be employed here for efficiency without compromising creative integrity.
Create a basedrum for a 155bpm song. I want hihat in between with slight echo effect. Also I have this hum audio file. Convert it to a synth. Make a second baseline in b-. Working like this is the new way that will be normal soon.
It has powerful MIDI clip editing capabilities via a custom DSL and more recently automation envelope support was added. It also has solid support for the native devices with VST/AU plug-in support coming soon. Basically every aspect of the Live API and Python remote scripts has been exposed via MCP and REST APIs (so you don't even need to use it with AI).
Many people get upset by the idea of MIDI generation, but you can use it however you want. I intended it to be an assistant to help with the tedious and repetitive stuff and to help overcome writer's block.
So much good stuff there, hard to pick a favorite. Also cool to see that the device list in channel strips is finally stable (it’s been an options.txt thing for years)
If I were considering this as a Christmas gift for a 16-year-old who likes making things in Garage Band, would the Lite edition still be a step up, or should I more seriously consider the next level up?
You don't usually purchase the Lite version, you get it with like a $50-100 worth of hardware from the likes of AKAI or Novation or whatever.
It has a hard limit of 8 tracks, Intro doubles that to 16, while Standard is the first version without limitations. Intro should be more than fine for most beginners.
I'd say Ableton lite is still a step up, and gives you familiarity with the Ableton interface, which means you are primed for using one of the bigger editions. However, if said 16-year-old does not currently have a midi keyboard / controller I would look at buying one that includes bundled Ableton Lite as the gift. Something from the Novation Launchkey range would fit the bill.
Ableton suite is amazing because of all the content you get with it (instruments, effects, samples), but lite comes with enough to get you going and you can always add vsts and samples from 3rd parties.
If you buy them a midi keyboard or controller it will usually come with a lite or introductory license. The push is fun but a real keyboard feels special and the pads and sliders and knobs really make Live feel like a real instrument rather than just a piece of software
That said you do get a ton of cool stuff with the higher editions
A subscription to splice or other sample/preset libraries opens up a world of possibilities as well
Having the full edition also makes it possible to use more of the example projects and templates out there, and you can follow along with the tutorials from Mr Bill too!
This is the best option by far. Lite/Intro is currently $80 on sale, but for $10-$20 more, you can get an MPK mini [1] which includes it. That version is limited to 16 tracks, but I mean... that was enough for most people up until the 90s.
+1 on this.. hardware is really what makes Ableton shine, Launchkey series all flow super well with Ableton and allow you to throw things together super fast.
To make it a gift comparable to Garage Band, I feel strongly that Standard edition would be the right play. Lite doesn't necessarily feel like a benefit to Garage Band beyond setting you on a more formal track for digital audio work.
New to music production but really want to give it a try. Can somebody please recommend resources/courses for beginners and which Abelton edition to buy: lite, intro, standard, suite? Also I was wondering if it is worth to buy akai mpk mini (play) to start with?
Not Ableton Live specific, more general knowledge for music production: I can highly recommend the courses from Audible Genius: Syntorial and Building Blocks.
Keep an eye out for their black friday deal(s), usually they have a really good package deal on BF (when I got it too).
Then Seed to Stage on YouTube has amazing videos on a bunch of topics, all very much focused on Ableton Live.
Get the basics of the software and basic music theory, then search your questions online as they come up.
The hardest part when I was starting was finding genre-specific advice on music production. It really took digging to get the nuggets of what felt like a trade secret. Now, though, there is a massive flood of video tutorials for just about any niche of music.
For music theory, flip through The Jazz Language by Dan Hearle. You may not need everything in there, but it will get you up to speed on contemporary music vocabulary.
If I'd be starting now I would rather try Bitwig first, I made music with Live from Live 8 until Live 11 but switched to Bitwig afterwards and, to me, it's a better DAW in general (except if you really need Max devices [look up Max4Live, it's a node-based DSP creation tool]) and even better for a beginner to get going with.
It's very likely that you already have some version of Ableton together with your audio interface. Make sure to register your product to see if you have any redeemable downloads.
Ableton's lessons, FabFilter's youtube channel. Start with Ableton Lite and go the upgrade route. In the past, usually if you bought a budget MIDI keyboard, you'd get a selection of entry-level DAWs included with that purchase. Ableton Lite was an option for the Alesis MIDI keyboard I bought. I'd suggest going that route.
I learned two things this week that may be useful to you:
1) if you buy an MPK mini - even if it's secondhand - you get a free license for Ableton Lite (this is true for basically all mainstream MIDI controllers, afaict)
2) if you have an Ableton Lite license, you get a sizeable discount on the paid versions.
So a cheap midi controller (Akai Mini et al) off of ebay will pay for itself if you're gonna buy Ableton anyway.
FL Studio is the most ethically licensed software I've ever used. In 2002, I paid $150 and have received lifetime updates since then. No ads, no renewal fees, no nerfing of my license to push me into a higher tier. Just the latest version every time it came out, from v3.4 to v26.
Contrast w/ Ableton, where you pay about that much every upgrade. Or something egregious like Adobe.
I'm actually rooting for FL Studio to NOT be cloned, respect to the way they ran their business, hope people pay them their money.
IS the idea that as the population increases, you'll always have a larger market share in in the future than you do now? Kind of like human inflation? If it's not that, I just don't see how they can keep the lights on month after month, year after year with single licenses.
That's how software used to work. The flip-side is that you bought "as-is" and you couldn't expect updates. Hell you might even have to re-buy a newer major version.
Because yes it doesn't really scale. I've worked at a place with software like that and it creates a lot of bad incentives. Where I was they sold a lot of custom development for revenue beyond the upfront licensing and you can imagine the toll that wrecked on the codebase over time.
So he is right - $150 for a lifetime license of good, continuously developed software is a steal.
How much has FL Studio evolved since you bought it? There's an expectation for software to "get better" or ship new features but some software can be considered done, going into just maintenance mode shouldn't be a bad thing for certain apps.
There are some projects in the works (I'm helping make an Ableton-like DAW), although they are all pre-alpha at the moment and it will remain to be seen if they can survive in the long term. I think that a DAW is a harder challenge compared to something static like SketchUp or Photoshop.
I don't know what Ableton have done to that webpage but 3/3 attempts to open it in Chrome on Android have caused a crash when I try to scroll down. Oh well, I guess I'll need to find out what's new in Ableton 13 somewhere else.
I like Ardour, but when choosing btw Ardour and Reaper - if you work with many VSTs or just exploring, this may be an interesting read:
https://ardour.org/plugins-in-process.html
all plugins in Ardour run in the app's process, so if one crashed - you might lose the project.
But UX for MIDI editing in Ardour is so much nicer than Reaper's to my taste.
I really liked the DAW itself, but how does it handle VST's? I tried setting my studio up on Linux with Bitwig a while ago and it was causing me a lot of pain and I gave up. Ableton is the only reason I still keep a dual-boot.
VSTs work perfectly fine in Bitwig. Whether a plugin supports linux is a different question though. I've tried to run windows VSTs via yabridge under linux but that was barely usable.
Yes, I remember trying to set up Omnisphere and it just wouldn't work for me. So my issues were related to windows VST's. I used Wine and yabridge, which did install them but they weren't usable.
It was last year and then I tried again some weeks ago. The issues I had were sometimes crackling audio and not being able to close a plugin's GUI window.
Depends what you mean by audio drivers, if you mean the audio subsystem, Jack has always been good for pro audio, and pipewire (the modern default) can be configured to be good too with the right packages.
If you mean device drivers, it can be a bit hit or miss, generally stuff works but for example I have an SSL audio interface and while the audio works, it's missing a lot of the configuration options that the Windows drivers give you around customisable audio routing.
Maybe timing is the wrong word. Latency is definitely a related concern.
If something needs to fire every 1209 ms then it can't get fired in 1232 ms this time and then 1198 ms next time. Maybe a better term would be clock jitter or drift?
As I understand it, a DAW needs something close to a RTOS.
I would think that's the kind of thing the installer would take care of for you or that the app would modify on first launch. It's not reasonable to expect DAW end users to make those kinds of changes.
Ah yes, I understand - yes as the other comment says, kernel supports it but most distros aren't configured that way out of the box, but it's pretty simple in most of them - on Arch you install the `realtime-privileges` package and add your user to the `realtime` group, the audio server and DAW software takes it from there.
They have a custom wine version that is built specifically to fix ableton issues on linux. I haven't tried this myself but I have heard good things about it on their discord.
Don't forget Renoise! It's proprietary, but Linux is a first-class build, it's inexpensive, and it's extraordinarily powerful and flexible for the right kind of mind/workflow.
ME TOO! lol. People will say Bitwig but boy I've tried it and it's really not the same. Getting it running with my UR22 is like a 5 step procedure, starting with getting the correct audio driver app running in the correct mode BEFORE starting bitwig, then praying bitwig recognizes everything and can achieve the right latencies... 50:50. I would never trust it for a live performance. The fact that so many people like it suggests to me the experience might be somewhat hardware dependent. i dual boot the machine though so it's pretty noticeable that the same hardware works flawlessly in ableton.
Reaper if you're more working with recordings or samples, Bitwig if you're working with MIDI directly, ReNoise if you're interested in the "tracker" workflow and sampling genres like breakbeat.
Also if you're keen on Open Source, check out Ardour and OpenMPT. I use the latter, but still limited compared to the commercial options.
Still no built-in way to collaborate with other musicians, it seems. While I understand the technical difficulties, it's also very frustrating to work remotely with other musicians on an Ableton project. I don't need real-time Google Docs like editing, but it would be nice to have something better than "freeze the project, dump it in Dropbox, and don't touch anything until they've made their edits".
Any Ableton Live users here that can chime in on how they solve that?
This is a pain point for me as well, but I'm not sure what solving this would truly look like. At the moment whenever I'm collaborating with anyone else, one of us will have the "primary" project file containing the entire mix/session, and the collaborator will be sent all stems individually, and they'll send their stems back for ingest in to the main project. It's pretty clunky, but it prevents the awkward "I don't have that plugin/VST/etc" issues that passing project files has.
I dream of a git-like workflow for Ableton, ideally with some sort of clever solve for the inevitable missing device issue (maybe freezing could solve this with some tweaks?).
I'm also curious to hear from others on how they solve this, especially when collaborating remotely.
This is very solvable in theory, we've been doing package management and version control in software for decades. I'm not familiar with the plugin/VST ecosystem enough but I'm assuming there's no real central registry ala pypi/maven/npm?
Many of the producers of the plugins are against a central repository for reasons you can guess; licensing and revenue generation. One annoying part of working with various plugins is the companies tend to have gatekeeper applications the user needs to interact with to get plugins authorized and installed on their system.
You will find applications like this one, https://www.pluginhubapp.com, show up frequently to try and manage this complexity. I am in no way at all recommending this application, but it is an example. This application does ship with all of its python code in the app under (possibly a mistake) so you can see the hoops they have to jump through to try and make their system work.
An easy way to share a project with collaborators. This is obviously hard because of the gazillion VSTs and multiple platforms that Live supports, but if I could just share the bare bones project (channels, tempo, and all built-in plugins that all Live users have) it would already be an improvement over the current situation.
In terms of workflow I can imagine a "shared project" view in Live that loads the shared bare bones project file and allows you to easily lay your own tracks on top (with whatever VSTs you have installed locally), and then allows you to freeze and share those recordings as audio in one go, in the shared project.
Question: what happens when you share a project made on a Mac version of Ableton with a windows user? All of the internal pathing in Project.xls will be macOS paths. It's not as simple as sharing a bare-bones project. Bounce stems.
I have worked on the code of legacy applications like MasterTracks Pro, Studio Vison and SAW and my opinion would be that you need to start from the ground up with collaboration as the guiding light. The existing applications have workflows and data models that are very monolithic and tied into the concept of a single user, using a single application with application logic and workflows implemented in code. That code sometime exposes functionality through scripting dictionaries or plugin APIs, but the this is backward in my opinion.
Other commenters have stated what a pain it is to just get two environments in sync. A complex production will have tons of plugins, various MIDI and audio interfaces, differing outboard gear and other variables that make life hard when sharing files.
You also have asset management issues; where are the audio stems, vocal tracks, library resources, etc. stored and how are they shared.
If you want to collaborate in real-time, then there is another layer of technical challenges.
I have been working on a system that is influenced from my earlier experience building audio tools for earlier generations of sequencers and DAWs, rendering pipelines for Dreamworks and configuration management systems for Amazon. I feel you really need a system that uses a DSL and all operations are defined at that level. There shouldn't be anything you can do in the user interface that isn't available at the DSL level. You can then think about techniques used in Docker, k8s, etc. to define and deploy both the environment and the interpretation of the DSL in the user interface.
This is the recurrent pain point I have and see my friends have with Live. An exported project always has something missing/blocking.
The procedure to ensure your project is properly fully exported should be one button in a single place, not a 4 steps checklist in different configuration views.
I rememeber trying blend.io and Splice studio back in the day, but they weren't too ergonomic due to lack of a 'project package' convention. There also was an inkling of native sharing for a while [0]:
> Officially, it was known as "Ableton Link Share" during early development and then launched as “Ableton Live’s ‘Share’ feature” — introduced around Live 9.1 (2013–2015 era).
> It allowed users to upload their Live Sets directly from Ableton Live to a personal web page (via ableton.com) to share projects with others — including audio previews and downloadable Live Sets.
> Ableton eventually discontinued the Share feature in 2017, citing limited use and the shift in focus toward Ableton Cloud / Splice / Link integration as alternative collaboration tools.
It seems to me that the super customizable, plug-in heavy architecture of modern DAWs.. especially Ableton makes collaboration almost impossible, at least without a change in IP/licensing model.
Right. How often are you collaborating with users who agree to only use vanilla Ableton plugins? Every time I've collaborated we have to start the conversation with what plugins we share, which ones are freely available, which ones would are not cost prohibitive for the other side to acquire, and so on.
That said, I think that vanilla Ableton provides a whole lot to collaborate with. Maybe there are a lot of people for whom the base set works, but "do you have Apollo UAD + the Neve preamp plugin?" or something like it is not a rare occurrence.
Why aren't you bouncing stems? You bounce the stems, they load them into their DAW, make edits with whatever tools they want, then bounce them out again. There's no need to transfer around whole projects...
This. It’s the canonical way to collaborate with audio. I even ”collab” with myself because loading old projects is fragile in general. Always has been.
> mainly it uses the underlying control surface layer to receive events with a python bridge then communicates those out to a central server, from there there's a websocket room you have to be invited to and you get all the updates.
> For changes or additions of samples/tracks it sends it to an incoming temp directory and edit's the ALS to read from it instantly
> The git portion is heavily inspired by git lfs, and stores your data in r2's but only diff's between the last version and current version.
It's a hosted product, but self hosting is possible even now. I think the code is up on github.
I was about to post exactly this. I don't even (personally) need collaboration, I just want to be able to branch, experiment, and merge. Even if we didn't get true version control, Fusion-style timelines would be such a huge improvement.
I know next to nothing about Ableton but aren't projects mostly a bunch of uncompressed audio or other large binary media files? Git doesn't really do well with that.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the .als files are quite literally just XML documents. Add in XML-specific chunking to git, and you could probably do "faux real-time" collaboration with git + Ableton project files.
> Any Ableton Live users here that can chime in on how they solve that?
I'm guessing you mean remote collaborations, but you don't actually mention that explicitly :D
Hot-seating works well for collaborations for me :) I've basically setup my home-studio to make it easy to "add in" more folks on a moments notice, with chairs and what not available when needed, and table space for when we do electronic jams with synths and whatever. Sometimes someone knows Ableton better than me, then I let them control everything, or vice-versa.
Folks around you (even complete strangers!) are surprisingly receptive to quick Instagram DMs with "Wanna jam at my home studio? :)" in them, and since music is what I do to get away a bit from the computer, forcing it to not ever be remote worked well for me to make it remain a more-or-less computer-less experience :)
if you're open to trying another DAW or exporting stems into one, https://audiotool.com is a full-featured browser DAW that can be used to produce professional-grade music.
It uses WebAssembly to bring performance on par with desktop DAWs, while being fully built around real-time collaboration. It even supports VST3
I was trying to build a version control system at one point. Basically an Ableton project is actually just a massive XML file that you could dump into a repo. I was trying to think of what a "git like" abstraction would work on top of it, but one of the challenges or problems I imagined would be all the VSTs/plugins and compatibility across units. In theory, the actual idea of freezing your XML and pushing to a git repo isn't so bad; it's similar to what Zepplin did with sketch ages ago, the fear was always - what happens when "figma" comes along and kills it but I didn't invest too much time into it.
The other challenge is media file management. Specifically, multiple MB & GB of media file storage means $$$ and git was magical because of free hosting. Then there was clip splicing and diffs - a wav file isn't exactly like a piece of code you can read directly and I don't have enough knowledge of the internals to make it work.
I was also worried Ableton would just take the idea and integrate it anyway and then it would be a wasted effort me
Years ago there was a startup called Splice here in NYC where the original product was basically just that -- version control and collaboration for Ableton (and maybe other DAWs?). I remember having an interview at Union Square Ventures for a role there and a couple of the partners asked me about them as they were an investment, and I really couldn't see a viable business in it the same way GitHub was for git. I brought up the storage costs as well.
I just looked them up and it seems like they're still around and pivoted to a learning DAW and a plugin marketplace.
I was working on exactly the same idea - mobile app to record stems, cloud-based projects - and I remember the sinking feeling when I read the TechCrunch article covering Splice's launch.
Surprised that 10 years later on there's still no industry juggernaut owning collab music production.
Parsec can be workable, the two issues I ran into were that your audio setup might not like it and you might have to use a virtual device/switch off of ASIO or similar for a screen share. The other was that drawing automation curves could be a little awkward on a client box.
I think with something like syncthing + taking turns as host if automation still has issues and a virtual output you can probably get a good flow going, even if not perfect.
There will be some session setup and configuration for abelton and endlesss as far as i/o is concerned… but once its running you can play with anyone anywhere in the world. Endlesss handles the ip, streaming, and discovery and link will make sure its all synced up…
Is the most elegant solution I’ve found by far.
I'm forever puzzled why the effects ribbon at the bottom is UI-locked to be so tiny - it could easily span double its height to allow you to see all your filters without needing to scroll horizontally.
I could be wrong about this, but I think it's because devices are designed with a fixed layout and are not responsive. Potentially every device's layout would need to be rebuilt to support resizing of the bottom ribbon.
People here might be interested to know that you can run Scheme (lisp) code directly in Ableton through my Scheme for Max project in Max for Live.
S4M is an open source extension to Max that allows you to run the s7 Scheme interpreter in a Max object, similar to the JS object in Max. Advantages over JS are that in can run in the high priority scheduler thread, enabling accurate timing, it has direct access to the file system from Scheme code, and allows you to make Scheme s-expressions directly in Max messages. It is also a very nice way to control the Live API, as the live API works on lists of symbols.
Are any of the schemes/lisps for music specifically worth checking out. I know there is CLM Common Lisp Music and it seems in general the language family would be a good fit
CLM was actually made by the author of s7, who is one of the godfather's of computer music. You could check out Common Music 3 which was a big inspiration for S4M and also runs s7, but it is unfortunately non longer actively developed as the author now has to teach using Python.
Other Lisp music related things include Incudine, Slippery Chicken, the Snd editor, MozLib (CL stuff for Max).
It is an integrated environment, but https://www.opusmodus.com is worth checking out if you are into algorithmic compositions and Lisp.
There have been several Scheme-like live coding systems that have become popular and faded away over the years. https://tidalcycles.org and its web-based friend https://strudel.cc are Haskell-like and were also getting some good attention a while go.
Once opening the door to Strudel.cc, there's no coming back. Its approach to patterns and sequencing is so ingenious, I can see a whole generation embracing it as modern way, modern notation for music, which is not played physically, but performed digitally. Further on - strudel is so easily plug-able that it easily integrates with DAWs and even a simple Mainstage + VSTs (or VCV rack) is more than enough to go totally berserk with both sound design or/and pattern sequencing.
Pretty cool! The Javascript object has really limited uses due to the low priority thread execution. Imo, they should have just exposed the C api in an object. I've tried writing my own Max external object in C, but ended up writing VST's (in JUCE) instead.
Ableton is a great inspiration for software devs. It's stable and efficient, and has amazing undo and file recovery systems. An antidote to Electron and chatbots.
Ableton is pretty unique in focusing on it's namesake "Live" (although Bitwig has clear lineage), and it definitely clicks together well. I think it would pair well with Logic or Cubase if you were doing "serious" work for a variety of reasons. But it is easily one of the better choices for getting started and for ideation.
you’ll need Studio for this, not standard. but i’d recommend Ableton over Logic right now. they are on the cutting edge of DAWs and have been for years.
Would you guys want to try out some pre alpha software built for exactly the use case of working remotely with collaborators on an ableton project?
The project is called kolab, it grew out of the practical issue of composing and producing music remotely. A few years ago when I lived in London I had a band project with a mate, but after I moved home to sweden we wanted to continue and the only way we get it work reliably was to use git lfs with some jiggerypokering where each of us had a similar studio setup. We have made over 200 ableton projects with the workflow so we have a sense of what works or not.
During the last year we have developed a system that is essentially an MVP, but we would welcome some people to test it in anger. Obviously its early days but we have spent the bulk of time making sure we have transactional semantics.
It works through reading an als (its a gzipped xml file), extract the referenced assets and storing their contents under hash-based identifiers on cloudflare buckets and we then use the cloudflare Artifacts for als versioning.
We do have a workflow we use manually for branching and merging that we have on the roadmap to implement as a feature but we are not there yet.
When it comes to the ethics about dealing with the data, we both believe that when we go live we would prefer end to end encryption, but need to think about recoverability. One thing is very clear. We rather close the whole project than to let data be used for example for model training.
We plan to have a free tier, but the idea is a small monthly subscription depending on usage. Currently we only support mac, but we do have windows support planned. What we have tested is the latest Ableton 12 version, but as you may know Ableton refuses to open projects saved in a never version. As a response for that we have experimental support of pushing a project as an Ableton 10 version.
I also want to mention that the software is in the stage of yeah it works, but needs much more testing before we could bump it to beta. So bear in mind there will be bugs.
If you are interested, please email: info at kolibrinkpg.com
They truly could not have chosen a worse website layout to announce this.
That aside, I have a soft spot for Ableton Live. It's a very clean UI with a refined and straightforward workflow and pretty much perfect stock effects, but aside from the new Drum Synth, this also feels like an incremental update branded as a new major version. Its provided instruments/synths are still lackluster. Sure, Operator punches above what its simplistic UI would have you believe, but it just pales in comparison to Sytrus. Ableton still has no built-in synth on the level of Harmor or Kepler Exo either, which if it did would be a massive boon considering Ableton's ethos of keeping all controls visible without needing to open the plugin. This update makes me feel I made the right choice by going with FL Studio years back.
Still seems they're ignoring to fix PDC mid-chain though. It's the one thing I check to see if they bothered with on every release, but I won't hold my breath.
That’s obscure but we’re on HN so I’m here for it. Live isn’t alone here; you won’t find mid-chain delay compensation in other prominent DAWs either, for instance Logic Pro. The usual fix is to keep high latency plugins either later in your chains, or put them on separate returns. A real fix would probably require every device to get its own offset clock. That could be a lot of under-the-hood work for gains most users won’t notice. They fixed automation delay compensation a number of releases ago, so I guess this never quite hits the top of their priority list.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 14.4 ms ] threadI'm not a fan boy of any companies or tools, but Live has continued to impress me with each release.
These are mutually exclusive the way I see it, and I would argue that personal preference is the right one.
I tried learning Ableton but didn't find joy in it, I think it's because FL Studio has closer origins to the music tracker days whereas Ableton avoided that.
I would say they both offer different mental modes that are orthogonal to one another
Instead of creating a LFO as part of the chain of devices it's clearly a thing embedded to the device itself, including on VSTs (so any VST can have more complex modulation than they offer natively). You can multi-target the modulator to affect any parameter on any of the devices across the whole track, so a LFO modulating something on the 1st device in the chain can also apply the same modulation to a parameter on the 9th device so they can be "coupled" to that movement, this mapping is also attenuated per application so even though the movement is the same it can have different magnitudes when assigned.
It completely removes the need of LFO Tool for complex curves/ramps, etc., or the LFO as a device with the "map" button to assign to parameters, if I want 10 LFOs I can just have them all together as a side-pane of a device or the track itself. It makes much more sense that a modulator is attached to something instead of being its own thing on a long list of devices.
Another improvement: macros can live on a control panel for a device, whole track, or even the whole project, so you can create a macro knob at the project-level and map it to affect any parameter of any track, and just map the project-level macro knob to a MIDI controller to modulate whatever parameter in the whole project.
These are just a couple of intuitive features from the top of my head I use in almost every single project.
[0] https://www.bitwig.com/userguide/latest/the_unified_modulati...
Quick edit: another feature I remembered after writing this comment that I find more intuitive is the creation of control pages for a device, it's accessible right below the "modulators" button and opens a side-pane to create up to 8 control knobs mapped directly to a device's/VST's parameter or even mapped to a "macro" modulator which itself can be mapped to many parameters of a device/VST, it's really intuitive to create pages of these controls and only use the controls themselves to change parameters, I barely open the VST window after experimenting a bit with which parameters I want to play with and mapping those to controls.
Yeah, I know... personal taste :)
It has powerful MIDI clip editing capabilities via a custom DSL and more recently automation envelope support was added. It also has solid support for the native devices with VST/AU plug-in support coming soon. Basically every aspect of the Live API and Python remote scripts has been exposed via MCP and REST APIs (so you don't even need to use it with AI).
Many people get upset by the idea of MIDI generation, but you can use it however you want. I intended it to be an assistant to help with the tedious and repetitive stuff and to help overcome writer's block.
This stuff is extremely hard and it's going to take quite a long time to get even close to functional.
These apps are far more than just their UI/UX. The audio drivers alone for real time audio present an incredible challenge.
We're not building this in a week, let alone a month or several months.
It has a hard limit of 8 tracks, Intro doubles that to 16, while Standard is the first version without limitations. Intro should be more than fine for most beginners.
Ableton suite is amazing because of all the content you get with it (instruments, effects, samples), but lite comes with enough to get you going and you can always add vsts and samples from 3rd parties.
You get lite with hardware purchase or in some magazines.
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209775685-Get-a-L...
That said you do get a ton of cool stuff with the higher editions
A subscription to splice or other sample/preset libraries opens up a world of possibilities as well
Having the full edition also makes it possible to use more of the example projects and templates out there, and you can follow along with the tutorials from Mr Bill too!
[1] https://www.akaipro.com/mpk-mini-4/
Keep an eye out for their black friday deal(s), usually they have a really good package deal on BF (when I got it too).
Then Seed to Stage on YouTube has amazing videos on a bunch of topics, all very much focused on Ableton Live.
The hardest part when I was starting was finding genre-specific advice on music production. It really took digging to get the nuggets of what felt like a trade secret. Now, though, there is a massive flood of video tutorials for just about any niche of music.
For music theory, flip through The Jazz Language by Dan Hearle. You may not need everything in there, but it will get you up to speed on contemporary music vocabulary.
Buy suite and the move if you can!
1) if you buy an MPK mini - even if it's secondhand - you get a free license for Ableton Lite (this is true for basically all mainstream MIDI controllers, afaict)
2) if you have an Ableton Lite license, you get a sizeable discount on the paid versions.
So a cheap midi controller (Akai Mini et al) off of ebay will pay for itself if you're gonna buy Ableton anyway.
SketchUp, after Google offloaded it, became paid software.
All these FL Studio, Ableton, etc.
SketchUp has already been cloned as Ketchup. I wonder if FL Studio and Ableton will soon be cloned?
pretty sure someone is already doing egui rust clone.
Contrast w/ Ableton, where you pay about that much every upgrade. Or something egregious like Adobe.
I'm actually rooting for FL Studio to NOT be cloned, respect to the way they ran their business, hope people pay them their money.
Because yes it doesn't really scale. I've worked at a place with software like that and it creates a lot of bad incentives. Where I was they sold a lot of custom development for revenue beyond the upfront licensing and you can imagine the toll that wrecked on the codebase over time.
So he is right - $150 for a lifetime license of good, continuously developed software is a steal.
all plugins in Ardour run in the app's process, so if one crashed - you might lose the project.
But UX for MIDI editing in Ardour is so much nicer than Reaper's to my taste.
It is cheaper, supports Linux and I start to think it is also the better DAW.
It's on flathub so you can try it on any distro and see if you like it.
Bitwig has so many tiny conveniences like this that I never bothered to renew my Live license. Native Linux support is the cherry on top.
There are even projects like this that let you restore the missing parts and use it elsewhere, but it's kinda buggy: https://github.com/velkajelka/linux-native-ableton
If you mean device drivers, it can be a bit hit or miss, generally stuff works but for example I have an SSL audio interface and while the audio works, it's missing a lot of the configuration options that the Windows drivers give you around customisable audio routing.
Maybe timing is the wrong word. Latency is definitely a related concern.
If something needs to fire every 1209 ms then it can't get fired in 1232 ms this time and then 1198 ms next time. Maybe a better term would be clock jitter or drift?
As I understand it, a DAW needs something close to a RTOS.
You might need to tweak kernel settings for better latency https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio#Optimizi...
https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux
They have a custom wine version that is built specifically to fix ableton issues on linux. I haven't tried this myself but I have heard good things about it on their discord.
For open source, Ardour but yeah...
Also if you're keen on Open Source, check out Ardour and OpenMPT. I use the latter, but still limited compared to the commercial options.
Any Ableton Live users here that can chime in on how they solve that?
I dream of a git-like workflow for Ableton, ideally with some sort of clever solve for the inevitable missing device issue (maybe freezing could solve this with some tweaks?).
I'm also curious to hear from others on how they solve this, especially when collaborating remotely.
You will find applications like this one, https://www.pluginhubapp.com, show up frequently to try and manage this complexity. I am in no way at all recommending this application, but it is an example. This application does ship with all of its python code in the app under (possibly a mistake) so you can see the hoops they have to jump through to try and make their system work.
In terms of workflow I can imagine a "shared project" view in Live that loads the shared bare bones project file and allows you to easily lay your own tracks on top (with whatever VSTs you have installed locally), and then allows you to freeze and share those recordings as audio in one go, in the shared project.
Other commenters have stated what a pain it is to just get two environments in sync. A complex production will have tons of plugins, various MIDI and audio interfaces, differing outboard gear and other variables that make life hard when sharing files.
You also have asset management issues; where are the audio stems, vocal tracks, library resources, etc. stored and how are they shared.
If you want to collaborate in real-time, then there is another layer of technical challenges.
I have been working on a system that is influenced from my earlier experience building audio tools for earlier generations of sequencers and DAWs, rendering pipelines for Dreamworks and configuration management systems for Amazon. I feel you really need a system that uses a DSL and all operations are defined at that level. There shouldn't be anything you can do in the user interface that isn't available at the DSL level. You can then think about techniques used in Docker, k8s, etc. to define and deploy both the environment and the interpretation of the DSL in the user interface.
Wasn’t that the one written in assembler? Kudos!
Amazingly, the website is still alive: https://www.sawstudio.com/products_sawstudio.htm I am not brave enough to download and try it out.
(I want to point out that I was not the author of SAW, Bob Lentini was. I worked on integrating SAW with MasterTracks Pro from Passport Designs.)
The procedure to ensure your project is properly fully exported should be one button in a single place, not a 4 steps checklist in different configuration views.
> Officially, it was known as "Ableton Link Share" during early development and then launched as “Ableton Live’s ‘Share’ feature” — introduced around Live 9.1 (2013–2015 era).
> It allowed users to upload their Live Sets directly from Ableton Live to a personal web page (via ableton.com) to share projects with others — including audio previews and downloadable Live Sets.
> Ableton eventually discontinued the Share feature in 2017, citing limited use and the shift in focus toward Ableton Cloud / Splice / Link integration as alternative collaboration tools.
[0]: https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=252909
That said, I think that vanilla Ableton provides a whole lot to collaborate with. Maybe there are a lot of people for whom the base set works, but "do you have Apollo UAD + the Neve preamp plugin?" or something like it is not a rare occurrence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50441616
https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/1xrbj82/been_an_ab...
> mainly it uses the underlying control surface layer to receive events with a python bridge then communicates those out to a central server, from there there's a websocket room you have to be invited to and you get all the updates.
> For changes or additions of samples/tracks it sends it to an incoming temp directory and edit's the ALS to read from it instantly
> The git portion is heavily inspired by git lfs, and stores your data in r2's but only diff's between the last version and current version.
It's a hosted product, but self hosting is possible even now. I think the code is up on github.
Asynchronous collaboration, there are a few non-native solutions.
Or you can always exchange files via Dropbox or something as you said. Or share screen.
Live playing over the public internet, there's no good way to do it , and can't really be due to latency. Many projects tried, all suck.
Live playing locally, there's Ableton Link.
This is a huge update (ARA alone, the step sequencer, etc) anyway, and many long awaited and several non expected items.
I was about to post exactly this. I don't even (personally) need collaboration, I just want to be able to branch, experiment, and merge. Even if we didn't get true version control, Fusion-style timelines would be such a huge improvement.
I'm guessing you mean remote collaborations, but you don't actually mention that explicitly :D
Hot-seating works well for collaborations for me :) I've basically setup my home-studio to make it easy to "add in" more folks on a moments notice, with chairs and what not available when needed, and table space for when we do electronic jams with synths and whatever. Sometimes someone knows Ableton better than me, then I let them control everything, or vice-versa.
Folks around you (even complete strangers!) are surprisingly receptive to quick Instagram DMs with "Wanna jam at my home studio? :)" in them, and since music is what I do to get away a bit from the computer, forcing it to not ever be remote worked well for me to make it remain a more-or-less computer-less experience :)
https://audiomovers.com/products/listento
It uses WebAssembly to bring performance on par with desktop DAWs, while being fully built around real-time collaboration. It even supports VST3
many great community features there too
The other challenge is media file management. Specifically, multiple MB & GB of media file storage means $$$ and git was magical because of free hosting. Then there was clip splicing and diffs - a wav file isn't exactly like a piece of code you can read directly and I don't have enough knowledge of the internals to make it work.
I was also worried Ableton would just take the idea and integrate it anyway and then it would be a wasted effort me
I just looked them up and it seems like they're still around and pivoted to a learning DAW and a plugin marketplace.
Surprised that 10 years later on there's still no industry juggernaut owning collab music production.
I think with something like syncthing + taking turns as host if automation still has issues and a virtual output you can probably get a good flow going, even if not perfect.
There will be some session setup and configuration for abelton and endlesss as far as i/o is concerned… but once its running you can play with anyone anywhere in the world. Endlesss handles the ip, streaming, and discovery and link will make sure its all synced up… Is the most elegant solution I’ve found by far.
[1] https://endlesss.fm/ [2] https://www.ableton.com/en/link/ [3] https://endlesss.net/
I’m working on two ARA-2 plugins so this is a small bit of good news.
S4M is an open source extension to Max that allows you to run the s7 Scheme interpreter in a Max object, similar to the JS object in Max. Advantages over JS are that in can run in the high priority scheduler thread, enabling accurate timing, it has direct access to the file system from Scheme code, and allows you to make Scheme s-expressions directly in Max messages. It is also a very nice way to control the Live API, as the live API works on lists of symbols.
https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max https://www.youtube.com/c/musicwithlisp
I'm planning another major release in the next few months as part of my PhD work.
Other Lisp music related things include Incudine, Slippery Chicken, the Snd editor, MozLib (CL stuff for Max).
There have been several Scheme-like live coding systems that have become popular and faded away over the years. https://tidalcycles.org and its web-based friend https://strudel.cc are Haskell-like and were also getting some good attention a while go.
Either way, going to give this a go!
So when I read something like
> you can run Scheme (lisp) code directly in Ableton through my Scheme for Max project in Max for Live
Well ... sometimes the universe decides to make your decision really really easy.
The project is called kolab, it grew out of the practical issue of composing and producing music remotely. A few years ago when I lived in London I had a band project with a mate, but after I moved home to sweden we wanted to continue and the only way we get it work reliably was to use git lfs with some jiggerypokering where each of us had a similar studio setup. We have made over 200 ableton projects with the workflow so we have a sense of what works or not.
During the last year we have developed a system that is essentially an MVP, but we would welcome some people to test it in anger. Obviously its early days but we have spent the bulk of time making sure we have transactional semantics.
It works through reading an als (its a gzipped xml file), extract the referenced assets and storing their contents under hash-based identifiers on cloudflare buckets and we then use the cloudflare Artifacts for als versioning.
We do have a workflow we use manually for branching and merging that we have on the roadmap to implement as a feature but we are not there yet.
When it comes to the ethics about dealing with the data, we both believe that when we go live we would prefer end to end encryption, but need to think about recoverability. One thing is very clear. We rather close the whole project than to let data be used for example for model training.
We plan to have a free tier, but the idea is a small monthly subscription depending on usage. Currently we only support mac, but we do have windows support planned. What we have tested is the latest Ableton 12 version, but as you may know Ableton refuses to open projects saved in a never version. As a response for that we have experimental support of pushing a project as an Ableton 10 version.
I also want to mention that the software is in the stage of yeah it works, but needs much more testing before we could bump it to beta. So bear in mind there will be bugs.
If you are interested, please email: info at kolibrinkpg.com
That aside, I have a soft spot for Ableton Live. It's a very clean UI with a refined and straightforward workflow and pretty much perfect stock effects, but aside from the new Drum Synth, this also feels like an incremental update branded as a new major version. Its provided instruments/synths are still lackluster. Sure, Operator punches above what its simplistic UI would have you believe, but it just pales in comparison to Sytrus. Ableton still has no built-in synth on the level of Harmor or Kepler Exo either, which if it did would be a massive boon considering Ableton's ethos of keeping all controls visible without needing to open the plugin. This update makes me feel I made the right choice by going with FL Studio years back.