Rendered at 18:16:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
iainctduncan 1 days ago [-]
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.
I'm planning another major release in the next few months as part of my PhD work.
12_throw_away 22 hours ago [-]
I have been agonizing this week about whether to drop a few hundred dollars on either GarageBand->Logic, or Ableton Lite->Standard.
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 conspires to make your decision really really easy.
theYipster 16 hours ago [-]
I have and use both Logic and Ableton Live Suite (which is needed for Max 4 live.) They are both great DAWs, and they can complement each other well. Which one you may prefer comes down to the type of music you create and whether you prefer a traditional linear arrangement style of recording (Logic and Ableton are both strong here, although Logic has a more traditional UI) or a session/live-loops based style of recording (Ableton is much stronger here than Logic IMHO.)
If your budget constrains you to Garage Band -> Logic or Ableton Lite -> Standard, you will get more with the upgrade to Logic, especially if you rely on the instruments/presets that come with the DAW rather than 3rd party plugins. Note that you can't use the Scheme integration unless you buy Ableton Live Suite, which costs considerably more than Logic or Standard.
pesfandiar 13 hours ago [-]
You can buy M4L as an add-on for Ableton Standard too.
jimmyjazz14 18 hours ago [-]
you might also consider Reaper which is infinity customizable, I personally use both Ableton and Reaper both are fantastic (as is Logic and Renoise which I also sometimes use). Might be worth noting that Max4Live is only included in Ableton Suite not Standard and other but can be added separately.
iainctduncan 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, I actually use S4M a lot with Reaper too. Sometimes my stack uses Live, and other times it's standalone Max with Reaper. It's also possible to get Reaper doing custom actions or running scripts in response to messages from Scheme for Max sent out over OSC. Reaper is great!
swerner 21 hours ago [-]
Note that Max 4 Live is not included in Standard.
blt 20 hours ago [-]
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.
kev009 20 hours ago [-]
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.
pitchlatte 20 hours ago [-]
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.
H1Supreme 1 days ago [-]
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.
Either way, going to give this a go!
rbartelme 19 hours ago [-]
Get out of town...that's wild. I wonder if my crusty old mac pro running ableton 11 + Max4live would work with this.
nylonstrung 1 days ago [-]
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
iainctduncan 1 days ago [-]
CLM was actually made by the author of s7, who is one of the godfathers 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).
diskzero 1 days ago [-]
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.
larodi 24 hours ago [-]
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.
paradox460 18 hours ago [-]
Could one run lilypond inside this inside Ableton?
legitronics 1 days ago [-]
Very cool will check this out more
sholladay 11 hours ago [-]
I can’t praise the folks at Ableton enough. In my early days of learning to be a music producer, I downloaded the demo for Live and made a track I liked. But then something went wrong and it didn’t get saved. The demo had recently expired while I was working on it and Live happened to crash when I went to go save it or something. It was just a fluke, probably having to do with the demo. But I contacted support to see if there was any chance I could recover the project if I paid for a license, which would have been a stretch for me at the time even for the basic version.
They tried really hard to help me recover my work even without a license but weren’t able to. They then apologized and proceeded to give me a full Suite license for free. I couldn’t believe it, I mean this is serious professional software and I had never even been a customer. That showed me that they really stand behind their product. I was able to start making a living off of it and eventually when I could afford it I bought another license even though I didn’t really need it that badly, mostly as a thank you.
The team over there is great and so is the software.
pentakkusu 6 hours ago [-]
I love it. I had a similar experience with JRiver (they used to be a big name in media organising software). After the demo expired, they asked me via email why I stopped using the software. I told them I did not have the means to pay for the full version, as I was a student at the time. BOOM, they shot me a full licence and wished me good luck with my studies. A wholesome memory. Just think about it from time to time. Taught me to pay it foward sometimes.
marceldegraaf 1 days ago [-]
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?
devrob 24 hours ago [-]
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
mtalantikite 23 hours ago [-]
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.
easyThrowaway 9 hours ago [-]
You mean these guys? https://splice.com/ They're absolutely massive in the music scene.
They're the de-facto sample library for 90% of any commercial track you've listened to on the radio/spotify/tv. There are a few Fred Again and Sabrina Carpenter songs that are basically just one straight sample taken wholesale from them.
Had no idea they started as a version control system.
cachvico 22 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
PhunkyPhil 1 days ago [-]
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?
diskzero 1 days ago [-]
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.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
> I'm assuming there's no real central registry ala pypi/maven/npm?
that's exactly right, unfortunately. it's a bit of the wild-west the it comes to plugins/VSTs in terms of distribution.
and I agree, this feels like the sort of thing that should be pretty solvable, but I think there's a lot of hidden complexity in this problem space. Solving the "version control" aspect of this feels like it should be rather straightforward for a single user, involving multiple users with different Ableton Live versions, different plugins/VSTs (and different versions within those) is where things would undoubtedly get messy.
I do think there is a niche market for this sort of thing, however.
theYipster 16 hours ago [-]
Not sure package management is the right solution for this. Maybe a lightweight execution sandbox environment for remote / guest machines? Another big challenge is the size of some plugins and their libraries--i.e. sample based plugins (Kontakt libraries, for instance) can be in the 10s to 100s of gigabytes.
> 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.
steveBK123 1 days ago [-]
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.
devin 1 days ago [-]
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.
butlike 1 days ago [-]
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...
diskzero 1 days ago [-]
True, but this is how we used to do it in the old days, when track limitations forced us to bounce with all the outboard effects baked into the track. Producers might not physically ride the faders anymore, but a lot of them are very reluctant to even track vocals through compression onto disk. They want to keep everything available for processing later on.
Now, is this a good idea? There is a lot to be said about having an upfront plan about the usage of effects and placement of parts on the soundstage and committing. This might be a lost art, as I keep seeing Pro Tools files with hundreds of tracks, with stacks and stacks of effects.
meowface 20 hours ago [-]
Freezing/bouncing also lets you have more determinism.
Plugins with (often intentional) indeterminism in them, variations in OS and CPU architecture, variations in how fast their CPU is (a billion plugins on a track may run smoothly for one person and destroy someone else's machine), variations in sample rate, etc. can subtly or substantially affect how something sounds.
And in general it just makes things way easier to share even ignoring the issues of getting people to install the same plugin at the same version and the IP issues.
butlike 1 days ago [-]
I mean, as an older fart, I do think there's value in committing to an idea. Though, I could also see benefit in having the processing be malleable until the last possible second. I mean, imagine if you're working with an egomaniac artist who keeps being wishy-washy on which sound they like best. If the effects are being printed and they want to go back, it could become a huge pain in the ass. AT THE SAME TIME, I think there's merit in telling someone 'no' so the project can move forward. I dunno, I guess it depends. I can see it both ways.
SnoozingBoa 23 hours ago [-]
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.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
yep this is what I do, though I haven't collaborated in a bit. it really is the best workflow at this point and it can be as granular as you need/want it to be.
pdntspa 14 hours ago [-]
You can freeze individual tracks in ableton ya? So can you freeze all the tracks in the project, then pass the project on with the frozen audio? Or does that still cause issues with plugins? (You'd ignore the warnings)
ulbu 12 hours ago [-]
control? bouncing is hella lossy. fine for jamming or for purely instrumental music. not good when software is itself an instrument.
anigbrowl 19 hours ago [-]
Just render audio/MIDI streams
You're probably going to be throwing around audio anyway. Will the performance be great? unlikely, but realtime remote audio collaboration is a luxury, not table stakes. If it doesn't need to be realtime, then it's not that big of a problem.
coldtea 1 days ago [-]
>Still no built-in way to collaborate with other musicians, it seems..
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.
fat-chunk 1 days ago [-]
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
many great community features there too
dleeftink 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
cromka 1 days ago [-]
I always thought they'd eventually implement some sort of version control, ideally git based, or a timeline similar to Fusion360.
12_throw_away 22 hours ago [-]
> timeline similar to Fusion360
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.
SoftTalker 21 hours ago [-]
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.
cromka 18 hours ago [-]
This is a DAW, so it generates most of the music, as opposed to audio editors (Sound Forge, Audacity) which operate like you say.
Vast majority of musicians use DAW, although some famously don't, e.g. Burial uses Sound Forge for his music.
coldtea 4 hours ago [-]
>This is a DAW, so it generates most of the music
Doesn't make much of a difference, as it still has audio recording, plus audio samples you can drag as loops or as drum machine sounds, and things like that, that are per project (not necessarily in the library).
Any vocals for example would be 32-bit float lossless tracks, usually multi-tracked too. And any variation of a track, whether midi/vst based or audio based, that you chose to render to a clip (a very standard workflow, saves cpu and allows you to do audio edits to that part), will also be backed by an audio file on disk. Same for every "frozen" track.
So it might be a DAW and not a purely audio editor, but it will still have lots of audio files it manages.
cromka 3 hours ago [-]
The idea is that the file format does not contain all the artifacts that it generates on the fly.
embedding-shape 19 hours ago [-]
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.
We did it for years with an owncloud instance, with a friend. It’s a PITA but kinda works.
wizardforhire 21 hours ago [-]
Endlesss [1 , 3] plus Ableton Link [2]
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.
Endlesss is by far the best remote collaboration example out there.
Other DAW manufacturers could learn a lot from the Endlesss architecture.
Got the t-shirt .. ;)
dango369 1 days ago [-]
version control for it hmmmmmmmm
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
What would you envision?
diskzero 1 days ago [-]
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.
hn_throw2025 1 days ago [-]
Wow, SAW… there’s a name from the past.
Wasn’t that the one written in assembler?
Kudos!
diskzero 1 days ago [-]
Yes. It helped to basically write your own operating system to work around kernel issues. Not really recommended though...
(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.)
marceldegraaf 1 days ago [-]
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.
butlike 1 days ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 1 days ago [-]
> 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 :)
Juliate 1 days ago [-]
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.
don3b 1 days ago [-]
Have you tried to collect tracks before sharing the project?
Juliate 7 hours ago [-]
Well, yes. And my point is somehow this: why does it need so much parameters/actions to just export a project? (because when you export it, you expect it to be the most possible working copy of your project, not a sub-part of it).
coldtea 4 hours ago [-]
Don't know what you mean.
You can export full mixdown audio.
You can export stems.
You can export midi parts as midi.
You can export / save as the whole Live project.
Obviously it can't magically make someone else you share it with have the same third party plugins.
But if you stick to audio + the internal instrument and fx plugins, then your exported full project would be editable and playable as is for everybody you share it with that also has the same Live version.
Juliate 7 hours ago [-]
Quite puzzling that a common UX problem report gets downvoted...
reminitone 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
cruano 1 days ago [-]
It's interesting to see them adopt this whole Rent-to-own model [1]. It's not quite a subscription since you end up with a full license to a particular version, but it is kinda like a subscription in the sense that a new version will be out by the time you are done with your payments. And it seems like you can "extend" it to get the new version, so it's a subscription with extra steps.
IMO that's a better model for consumers since you do get something at the end of it. And if you are a professional, you were probably already getting the latest and greatest every time anyways.
I did a double take when I first saw that a few months ago. You can pause and pick it up again and keep your progress towards full ownership. So nice, extremely consumer friendly.
icantevenhold 24 hours ago [-]
I used Ableton 9 for many years before upgrading to 12.
The model just works because you don’t need to upgrade constantly, it’s nothing like a subscription.
kstrauser 21 hours ago [-]
I only upgraded to get the Apple Silicon version for my newer Mac. I'm sure I'll be on 12 for quite a while.
jimmyjazz14 18 hours ago [-]
I really think its a decent model, one really doesn't usually need the latest and greatest version of Ableton to do most things and the rent to own option give broke artist a way to get into the software while the developers still get paid.
cowlevel 12 hours ago [-]
Their competitor Bitwig has a rather ethical payment model if that's what you're looking for: you pay for a perpetual license to the current version and the next year of updates.
notagoodidea 6 hours ago [-]
Which is also the case for Ableton and other DAW like Renoise. You pay for the perpetual license to the ongoing major version and any upgrade until the next one. In the case of Ableton, they have around 4 years between major version? Renoise is slightly different, you pay for a full cycle of versioning up to the same minor version one major version up, eg from 2.4 to 3.4.
In general, for most DAW the whole subscription practices did not fully takeover like for other creative software like photography or video.
asdff 20 hours ago [-]
How much different is ableton live vs ableton live lite? I get the latter free with my audio interface, not sure if terms are changing with 13 but they let me get version 12 with my 10 year old focusrite.
barkingcat 19 hours ago [-]
Extremely different. Lite has track limit (8) and is missing EQ8 - the stock multiband equaliser, among other things.
go through it and you'll see that Standard is the least you'd want, and Suite is a great deal.
brokenmachine 19 hours ago [-]
I think the biggest thing is a track limit (8?), but I'm sure there's other things. Max4live, etc.
jimmyjazz14 18 hours ago [-]
three main version are Lite, Standard and Suite. Lite is pretty decent and almost has everything that Standard has except limits you to 8 tracks, Suite is where the real magic is though with Max4Live and such.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
> so it's a subscription with extra steps.
To me it sounds like a subscription with all of the benefits, with none of the downsides, so basically not at all like a subscription, more like a loan you can take almost, as subscriptions are basically used by companies who want to extract as much "value" from users as they humanly and legally can.
> And if you are a professional, you were probably already getting the latest and greatest every time anyways.
I guess it depends on how much money you make, and where you live. Here in Spain, professional users of Ableton tend to be a version or two behind the latest (even a couple of months ago I saw someone using Ableton 10 still, its many years old), as it isn't a free upgrade, and musicians aren't exactly making a ton of cash.
Then most people using Ableton don't use all of Ableton, but parts of it. If you're not using it for sequencing, and the new version mostly have sequencing updates (just an example), then skipping upgrading makes a ton of sense.
127 1 days ago [-]
It's a transitional stage from perpetual licenses to subscriptions.
diskzero 24 hours ago [-]
Maybe or maybe not. I would say in general most of us here are not fans of subscription services. Those of use who have sold software and tried subscription services are very aware of the hate received by many of those paying for the subscriptions. I assure you that Ableton management is extremely aware of the general unfavorable opinion users have of subscription software. This rent-to-own model is an attempt to provide a quality product to as many users as possible and still manage to operate a going concern. Almost no one gets into the creative software space with the intention of gouging their users. There are much better outlets for people with those intentions.
Now, if Ableton ends up being acquired by a private equity firm, you may very well see a shift in their pricing model where extracting revenue from customers at the expense of product quality becomes primary.
If you have worked with any of the people currently, or formerly, running Ableton, you will know that they worked hard to regain their financial independence from their outside investors and I doubt becoming a predatory software subscription service is on their roadmap.
icantevenhold 24 hours ago [-]
It also wouldn’t work because I can just keep using the current version indefinitely.
There is very little reason to upgrade to the latest versions IMO
127 17 hours ago [-]
Substance was also really cool company with the same model and Adobe bought them out.
wickedsight 11 hours ago [-]
> if Ableton ends up being acquired by a private equity firm
That 'if' really is doing a lot of heavy lifting and I hope it really is nothing more than an 'if'. PE feels like the Sith in Star Wars, a dark force that works in the dark and wants to take everything that is good and extract money from it until it inevitably dies.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
Source?
20 hours ago [-]
iamsaitam 21 hours ago [-]
Shameless plug, but one of the toughest parts of working with Ableton Live is managing all your projects and keeping track of what's what.. unless you use REKALL[1]. An application I worked on (actually me, not claude, but claude did review a few bits) in order to help me manage my 400+ live sets.
Thanks for sharing! The “Music/Composition” folder in my Google Drive has been growing beyond human management (“Song 1”, “c major idea”) so will definitely try this out.
te_chris 9 hours ago [-]
This is sweet!
stcg 21 hours ago [-]
After switching from Windows to Linux years ago the only application I ever missed is Ableton.
I remember loving its basic effects: the (pingpong) delay, the reverb, the Eq, the compressor. And how easy it was to consolidate a track ander build further on top of it, cut it up, make a new instrument using it.
Great software
I tried running it with Wine but the experience wasn't great. And if it even worked, the VST's would be a whole new problem. So I dropped the hobby of digital musical production in favour of other hobbies
gglitch 18 hours ago [-]
Don’t drop the hobby!!! There is so much amazing music software for Linux. Bitwig is all over this thread but Renoise is a mindblowing tracker that’s built for Linux, and then there’s all the FOSS stuff - Ardour is brilliant. SunVox, VCV Rack, etc etc. So much ingenuity in the free software world.
sureglymop 10 hours ago [-]
I'm quite sure it's due to AIs now-decent capabilities but lately I've seen some promising work in making Ableton with WINE usable: https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux
NietzscheanNull 21 hours ago [-]
If you ever get back into it, Bitwig is excellent and supports Linux natively.
jimmyjazz14 18 hours ago [-]
Reaper runs great in Linux and advancement like yabridge makes running Windows plugins in Linux fairly easy these days.
amarko 20 hours ago [-]
I also highly recommend Bitwig.
kypro 21 hours ago [-]
Ableton is literally the only reason I still have Windows installed.
I'd love a Linux version, but I assume it would be useless because I doubt any VSTs would work with it.
jasonm23 14 hours ago [-]
I've got one windows box tucked away for Ableton, everything else got moved to Linux.
I have not used Ableton in some time now and ... well I do appreciate having the option but really feel sick using Windows under any circumstances, Macos too now since about 2019.
brokenmachine 19 hours ago [-]
Me too.
I've considered trying it in a VM, but I know it'd be janky and probably unusable because of latency or some other issue.
semtud 1 days ago [-]
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?
jleehn 1 days ago [-]
I would start with Ableton's lessons, they're delightful.
Just wanted to say, thank you! These lessons are fantastic.
12_throw_away 22 hours ago [-]
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.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
Part of this answer depends your specific budget/financial situation. I've been an Ableton user since 2014. I bought Live 9 Lite at the time (probably came included with a midi device I bought), because I was still in undergrad and wasn't sure if I was going to stick with it. Looking at my order history, I later bought Live 9 Standard and used that until 2018 when I upgraded to Live 10 Suite (I've since upgraded to every new version of Suite on release, including 13).
My advice, if you have the budget, get Standard and upgrade to Suite later (at a discount). Suite is _nice_ but it's really mostly bells and whistles that you don't "need" to get from Ableton. Suite has a ton of included sound packs and instruments that are certainly useful but may not be useful to you.
As for the Akai MPK Mini, that's going to be entirely subjective IMO. I've bought several midi controllers over the years, and I've settled on a few key pieces that I'm happy with. The Arturia KeyStep 37 is the perfect keyboard for my desktop. It has enough range in a compact form factor and doesn't have any features I don't need (I'm not affiliated with Arturia).
If you don't already have a midi keyboard, I would suggest grabbing an affordable one!
msarris 1 days ago [-]
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.
flufluflufluffy 18 hours ago [-]
This course from Rachel K Collier and Mary Spender is really good:
The course follows Rachel teaching Mary (a musician but with no experience in Live), so you learn along with her. I think they might’ve done it in Live 11 so some little things might be different but on the whole I think it’s worth it.
glemmaPaul 1 days ago [-]
akai mpk is great! On tuts and such; I really enjoy "You suck at music production" youtube channel, who happens to use Ableton. Overall with music though, imo it's often time trying out combination of effects/instruments/midi that makes for the best learning.
Good luck with the music!
jimmyjazz14 18 hours ago [-]
Buy a cheap midi controller from Akai or Arturia and they usually come with a free license for Lite, which in turn will give you a decent discount should you decide to upgrade to Standard or Suite, not to mention having a decent midi controller make use Ableton and such much more enjoyable.
piva00 1 days ago [-]
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.
garlic_yogurt 1 days ago [-]
Iirc lite was free. I think thatd be a good start. Only limitation (iirc) was that it gave you only 8 channels which as a beginner should be more than enough. Has stock instruments that also should be more than enough. And there are loads of free VSTs, software instruments and effects
zabriel_goss 1 days ago [-]
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.
eliasdorneles 10 hours ago [-]
I recommend using Reaper which has plenty of education videos on their website and great community support.
bryceneal 1 days ago [-]
I would start with intro. Lite is only offered bundled with certain hardware products.
The biggest difference with intro is that you are limited to 16 tracks, and some of the software plugins aren't present. If you are new to music production then this should hardly matter to you. You will be able to get a good sense of whether you enjoy working with Ableton or not, and you can always upgrade later.
butlike 1 days ago [-]
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.
If ever there was a hobby/niche not lacking in tutorials it's music production. Besides maybe DIY home repair.
kmfrk 1 days ago [-]
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.
kingkongjaffa 1 days ago [-]
I personally bought a midi keyboard that included some free starter stuff including a limited version of ableton mine is https://www.arturia.com/products and works well with mac osx and all the mainstream DAWs .
slim 12 hours ago [-]
akai mpk mini play has a defect in some of the units : the pads are too stiff. You have to hit them very hard to make the sound loud
1 days ago [-]
NSUserDefaults 1 days ago [-]
Not new to 13 but I love Ableton's clean UI. Similar to Blender, it's how all creative apps (and systems!) should do it.
maciejzj 1 days ago [-]
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.
dbbk 8 hours ago [-]
This is a great way to put it. Even though it doesn't look stereotypically "modern" it does have its own personality and feels... kinda solid
trueno 1 days ago [-]
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
crucialfelix 1 days ago [-]
It's because they grew up playing with Fischer Technik.
nprz 1 days ago [-]
They really do a good job especially considering how much complexity is contained within Ableton.
block_dagger 23 hours ago [-]
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.
tuzemec 1 days ago [-]
Dunno... but coming from Studio One, I find Ableton’s interface very off-putting and ugly.
Yeah, I know... personal taste :)
drewbeck 23 hours ago [-]
I started on Logic and it was a perfect intro to Ableton. Only after struggling endlessly in Logic could I truly appreciate the elegance of Ableton!
hmokiguess 1 days ago [-]
I actually much prefer FL Studio UI over Ableton's
dyzone 1 days ago [-]
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.
hmokiguess 1 days ago [-]
> 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
Capricorn2481 1 days ago [-]
For sequenced music, I love FL Studio, and I think you get a lot of value from it too. Free updates for life has been amazing.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
Agreed, it's really intuitive (or it was for me). I feel like it has just the right learning curve, it just makes sense.
fishfasell 1 days ago [-]
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.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
Same. To be honest I tried using FL Studio (back when it was "Fruity Loops") and it never fully clicked with me. Live immediately made sense, it's been home ever since.
dyzone 1 days ago [-]
Fl studio browser was the biggest turnoff for me.
jleehn 1 days ago [-]
100% agreed, gold standard in creative software design
piva00 1 days ago [-]
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.
jleehn 1 days ago [-]
Would you mind describing an example?
piva00 20 hours ago [-]
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.
alfyboy 1 days ago [-]
Wish they would add Linux support. What is the best option for Linux?
throwa356262 1 days ago [-]
Bitwig.
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.
multisport 1 days ago [-]
+1 bitwig. It's so fun
melvinroest 1 days ago [-]
+2 as a beginner in Ableton and Bitwig, I'm a bigger fan of Bitwig.
dominotw 1 days ago [-]
Best for hobbyist goofing around. Which is me ( and pbly most ppl here)
liljacob 1 days ago [-]
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.
LukaD 1 days ago [-]
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.
mestelan 1 days ago [-]
Was that some time ago? I find Yabridge to work reliably on numerous plugins.
LukaD 24 hours ago [-]
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.
liljacob 1 days ago [-]
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.
dyzone 1 days ago [-]
I didn't face any VST related issues on linux.
bigyabai 1 days ago [-]
VSTs work better than Live, because each VST is sandboxed. If one plugin crashes, it doesn't bring down the whole DAW along with 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.
theYipster 16 hours ago [-]
Sandboxed plugins are a tradeoff, as then you can't have ARA support (coming to Live 13.)
easyThrowaway 1 days ago [-]
Ironically they added linux support... for Live Push 3. It runs an headless x86 version of the desktop suite ported to linux.
Very interesting but damn, it needs AVX-512 instructions, so it won't work on Intel 12th Gen or later.
kidel001 23 hours ago [-]
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.
fp64 7 hours ago [-]
I use Reaper and Bitwig, very happy. Several Windows plug-ins through yabridge for when there is no native Linux version. Not going back to Ableton now, or ever, they lost me.
Also got to love JACK and pipewire to the point that nowadays MacOS feels archaic in comparisson.
soundworlds 22 hours ago [-]
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.
criddell 1 days ago [-]
Are Linux audio drivers good enough? At one point they were not reliable enough from a timing perspective but I have no idea if that's been fixed or not.
lewispollard 1 days ago [-]
Depends what you mean by audio drivers, if you mean the audio server, Jack has always been good for pro audio, and pipewire (the modern default) can be configured to be good too with the right packages. In terms of timing (latency you mean?) I have zero complaints using Jack via pipewire on a proper audio interface.
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.
criddell 1 days ago [-]
> latency you mean?
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.
MrDrMcCoy 1 days ago [-]
Linux can run specific apps with realtime priority since 6.12. Just gotta configure your audio stack to run that way.
anthk 23 hours ago [-]
At the grub config, append to the end of the "kernel" line:
preempt=full
criddell 22 hours ago [-]
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.
lewispollard 19 hours ago [-]
I don't know if any DAWs do any modifications for you, but I know Bitwig at least pops up a warning if realtime privileges aren't detected with a documentation link.
aa-jv 9 hours ago [-]
Ubuntu Studio is configured to be useful for audio out of the box. Bitwig runs great on it too!
lewispollard 1 days ago [-]
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.
aa-jv 9 hours ago [-]
Ubuntu Studio - its Linux set up and good to go for audio. Great latency (akin to my Macbook) and tons of neat software onboard. Tons of plugins too.
cowlevel 12 hours ago [-]
Bitwig wants to use JACK which allegedly solves this problem. As a hobbyist goofing around, I launch JACK connected to ALSA output before launching Bitwig, but apparently it can also take native control of your speakers.
ivanjermakov 1 days ago [-]
pipewire-jack adapter is good enough for me to use PC as a guitar pedal with guitarix and maudio sound interface.
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.
aframemodular 1 days ago [-]
Studio One has Linux support for non-open source and it's been around for longer than Bitwig.
For open source, Ardour but yeah...
gglitch 1 days ago [-]
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.
robotswantdata 23 hours ago [-]
+ 1 bitwig , Ableton feels stale compared. You can modulate anything easily
tosti 1 days ago [-]
Ardour
vindex10 1 days ago [-]
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.
voidnullvalue 1 days ago [-]
Reaper
luqtas 19 hours ago [-]
Csound 7!
MrDrMcCoy 1 days ago [-]
Tracktion has always appealed to me.
EastLondonCoder 1 days ago [-]
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
aa-jv 9 hours ago [-]
Sounds interesting - got any experience with Endlesss? That is the gold standard for remote collaborative editing ..
alkonaut 1 days ago [-]
Since Bitwig came out I think Ableton felt a bit clunky. I'm no expert in either of them, but as a beginner, it felt like Bitwig got a fresh start both with Performance and UX.
vunderba 1 days ago [-]
Love Bitwig. I don't know if Ableton ever got around to fixing it, but one of the real standouts for me with Bitwig when it first released was that it sandboxes VSTs and plug-ins, so if one goes rogue, it doesn't take down your entire DAW.
ultrasandwich 9 hours ago [-]
This. I love testing wild VSTs but they shouldn't bring down the whole app.
alkonaut 1 days ago [-]
Still the same (as far as I know).
I have developed some VSTs so I noticed this can be pretty handy!
butlike 1 days ago [-]
Multiband Rack is going to be great. No more having to 3x a multiband dynamics rack into a group to get low/mid/high separation.
Also the Device slots overview in session view could be useful. I'm kind of excited guys, ngl
IAmGraydon 22 hours ago [-]
I agree the multiband rack looks awesome, specially given the fact that it has linear phase. Also looking forward to the new drum synth and sequencer, among other things.
wappieslurkz 5 hours ago [-]
I sold my license of Live 12 three weeks ago, great timing as it turns out.
I went with Reason 14 instead: I'm just so much more productive with Reason, even with the free version (initially). The Ableton Live workflow is just too clumsy and uninspiring IMO.
waldothedog 17 hours ago [-]
Anyone else have a hard time w this site? It was nearly finished loading when it crashed my phone so hard I couldn’t even force reboot. Never seen anything like that. Just had to put my phone down for 10 mins and come back to find it had closed Safari and seemed to be back to normal
AaronAPU 1 days ago [-]
Finally ARA-2 support!
I’m working on two ARA-2 plugins so this is a small bit of good news.
Computer0 20 hours ago [-]
Lack of ARA-2 support was the primary thing driving me away from Ableton.
ilumanty 1 days ago [-]
The style of marketing page does not live up to the software's quality.
butlike 1 days ago [-]
They're trying to appeal to the younger generation.
silvester23 1 days ago [-]
It's made in Berlin and I guess you can see that on the page.
dbbk 8 hours ago [-]
God bless it
lukaszkorecki 1 days ago [-]
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)
I'm excited about the Transient shaper. Hopefully I can finally ditch my beefy SPL transient designer.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
same here, it's kind of crazy that Ableton hasn't had a good option for shaping transients out of the box until now!
bryceneal 1 days ago [-]
The compression gate has a "Transients" knob, which I think may be the only option currently. It's just one knob so it's a pretty blunt tool. I wouldn't call it a good option.
aylmao 22 hours ago [-]
I'm a hobbyist Ableton user, and it inspired me to try to build my own web-based DAW as a side-project a few years ago. I think the look I went for speaks of my Albeton use.
It's still very unpolished, if you want to check it out, all feedback is welcome: https://minidaw.aykev.dev/
I should pick this project up again. It's a little daunting to build alone, but AI tools should make it much more managable than it was when I first got started.
royal__ 1 days ago [-]
Ableton Live is a great DAW that is still unmatched in it's live performance capabilities. At the same time, I find it tough to approach price wise. The base version is $300 (the $79 version is basically a demo), and some of the best features are behind the $600 version. Not only this, but you have to pay for new major versions (although it looks like they are offering a free upgrade right now if you buy Live 12). This is tough in comparison to FL Studio, which gives you the full DAW for less than $300 with lifetime updates. Haters will say FL Studio is unprofessional noob software, but the last time that was true was in 2011 or something.
diskzero 1 days ago [-]
I sympathize with your opinion on the prices and I really appreciate how FL Studio has managed their lifetime upgrades. When you look at the monthly amortized cost of the $600 spent on Ableton, it is right in the range of monthly audio and video streaming services and way less than a monthly phone plan that a lot of us are paying for. I wouldn't say they are gouging their users, and if they are like any other small software company, they are probably on the knife edge of profitability any given quarter.
The cost of audio (or any) software has been something people have been complaining about for decades. When I started in the audio software industry, the prices (amazingly!) were just as high or higher as the prices today. Some of this cost was due to physically creating boxes, manuals, storage media and paying to get the product into sales channels. Viewed historically, you might see that you are getting a much better deal today with Ableton for $300 than Opcode Studio Vision 1.0 in 1990 for $995. In 1990, you had to call into Opcode for support and there was no online community for support and information sharing.
It is real conundrum running a company that sells creative tools; the very users you want to bring in as new customers might be the ones that are the most resistant, or unable, to paying the full price. The industry has tried to come up with various ways to assist the people, including the $79 version of Ableton that you are not a fan of.
When you are actually deriving your income from the use of the product, the pricing becomes less of an issue and I clearly remember Warner Brothers buying dozens of copies of our software to support a Danny Elfman project because he was using our software. I also remember struggling composers begging for education pricing or even free copies of the software at our booth at the NAMM trade show.
FL Studio is not unprofessional noob software by any means. Ultimately, a talented singer, songwriter, composer, DJ, etc. will use any means they have on hand to be creative.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
just upgraded (pre-ordered) from live 12 suite to live 13 suite for $183 USD. that's ~$15/mo for 12 months if we spread the cost out.
looking back at my order history, I upgraded from Live 10 Suite (purchased 2018) to Live 11 Suite for $245.60 in 2021 and again from 11 Suite to 12 Suite in 2024 for $245.60.
Everyone has a different financial situation, but for me this is entirely fair pricing for professional grade software that does not have a subscription that I use on an almost daily basis. I am happy to continue supporting Ableton, they respect me as a user and are consistent in their quality and output. (I don't use FL Studio, this is not a dig at that company/platform, just a happy Ableton user).
TheOtherHobbes 24 hours ago [-]
It's not an extortionate price, but the upgrades are a bit retro.
Leading with a step sequencer, automation recording, a loop mangler, and a basic drum synth in 2026 isn't pushing the creative limits of DAW design.
IMO Live is a tolerable product rather than an exciting one. Back in the days when I was making loop-based music I got more done more easily with Sonic Foundry's (then Sony's) Acid, which is still my gold standard for ease of use for that idiom.
And I still think Vegas is the best video editor I ever used.
I think with vibecoding the days of the big DAWs are numbered. A few years from now people are going to be rolling their own designs. We're going to see a lot of slopware, which won't matter because it's single-user, and some rare but incredibly inventive and inspiring completely new takes.
gglitch 18 hours ago [-]
SF Acid was brilliant. I had so much fun with that software. You’re exactly right: it was just so easy to use.
butlike 1 days ago [-]
It's an incremental DAW. You're supposed to buy upgrades as you need features. A noob doesn't need a spectral resonator and convolution reverb. But that same person when they become an intermediate might.
What they should really have is a demo version of the next tier up for when I'm considering upgrading. Say if I have Standard Edition, I click the "Try Suite" button and it temporarily unlocks the Suite features without overriding my base install. I can then easily decide to upgrade (or not), but the main issue is the next tier's features are locked behind an install, so people go into it with the mentality that they have to decide on a product tier when they're a noob and don't know anything about the product.
icantevenhold 24 hours ago [-]
The demo version is to crack the software. It’s super easy to do and I think it’s intentional
Morromist 19 hours ago [-]
I'm a big FLstudio user. I've used both DAWs and prefer FLstudio for game music. It may be because I'm more used to using it though.
tnolet 1 days ago [-]
As a (formerly) semi-pro musician these price discussions are always so funny. $300 ($600) is so crazy cheap for the beating heart of your studio. Even more considering the price of any semi decent mic, guitar, synth or any piece of musical / studio equipment.
999900000999 1 days ago [-]
For the vast majority of users music is only a hobby.
I've been making beats for about 20 years. For me music is essentially a diary that others occasionally read.
I'll never make a nickel off this.
Also if I buy a 2000$ microphone I own it forever and I can even sell it and maybe recoup half.
Vs paying 200$ a year forever.
Plus FL Studio is about 300$ once for the All Plugins edition.
icantevenhold 24 hours ago [-]
pirate the software if you don’t plan to use it professionally?
You can easily get some older version and play around with that for free.
In my case I bought a launchpad many years ago and for a long time used the Ableton Lite version that came with it. Was more than enough for hobby usage.
999900000999 23 hours ago [-]
If you believe software should be free that's a different conversation.
I have no problem with paying for software I enjoy.
mystifyingpoi 23 hours ago [-]
Why would you assume someone owns a literal studio? There are so many ways people use DAWs, recording in a studio is only one of them.
icantevenhold 24 hours ago [-]
I used an older version (8 or 9) for many many years.
You don’t need to get the new major versions.
It’s also really easy to crack Ableton and use it for free if you just want to test it out - i think it’s part of their sales strategy tbh
IAmGraydon 22 hours ago [-]
First of all, Live Suite 12 is $449 on Thomann when it goes on sale (like now), and if you're buying it anywhere else then you're wasting your money. Also, that's expensive? People are paying that much for some plugins these days. It's an instrument. I just paid $2500 for a guitar, and though I love it, Ableton seems like a steal considering how much more it does than a guitar.
faangguyindia 1 days ago [-]
I remember these were the software programs that had no good alternative back in the day.
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.
quaffcode 1 days ago [-]
I think Real Time Audio is hard to get right. Creating a Digital Audio Workstatio (DAW) was what inspired the creation of Zig - the creator felt that it was such a difficult problem that current languages weren't sufficient. I bet it will be less trivial for AI to clone Abelton than the Adobe suite.
swerner 1 days ago [-]
Yes, it’s pretty unforgiving. Low latency and live performances leave no wiggle room - software must be low latency and highly reliable. You can’t afford to drop one in 10000 buffers.
cowlevel 12 hours ago [-]
How low? I don't think the click-to-sound latency is that critical, could easily be 50ms or more. Almost every video game does something like this.
If you're connecting your machine to several physical effect pedals ... Then you probably need latency compensation.
earthnail 9 hours ago [-]
10ms is reasonable. Above 20ms it gets annoying for the drummer or any other percussionist if you use the software in a realtime environment. For example, recording in a studio setting when you want to hear your own track, too, while recording.
It’s really surprisingly unforgiving, even on today’s machines.
MrScruff 1 days ago [-]
I'm not so sure. I've been building a live iPad based mixer for my modular the last couple of weeks. I've been a heavy user of Live and other audio apps for years and it's been pretty trivial to put together. Been running it with tons of simultaneous tracks, effects, and complex DSP with latency compensation interfacing with my 10 in 8 out interface and haven't had a glitch the entire time.
theYipster 16 hours ago [-]
Soundcraft isn't it, but check out Morningdaw. The rate at which its evolved suggests it's very much LLM-made.
I spent some time with Soundcraft. It is no way a clone, or even a blurry reflection of any of the leading DAWs like Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, etc. It has some passing resemblance to Reaper, but Soundcraft isn't even close in usability and cohesiveness.
I have heard people claim that ArtCraft are not using LLMs to generate their apps, but the presentation and code almost seem like someone gave their LLM agent the Reaper manual and asked it to produce a clone.
Their main tagline on the site is also strange "Professional audio recording and mixing, rebuilt in pure Rust." Really, who cares? No one I know in the performance, composition and recording industry cares at all. What they care about is reliability, stability, workflows and support. Yes, and price. But none of the flagship DAWs have onerous pricing and as others have pointed out, FL Studio has been a good investment over the years. If price is a concern, it is hard to beat Reaper in terms of value and functionality.
I am sure people will continue to one-shot or iterate clones of the leading DAWs and some people will try to use them and probably end up wasting their time on their productions when whoever is behind the project moves on. It is extremely hard work supporting any application and the users of MIDI, audio and notation software are extremely demanding.
My career started way back working on apps for companies like Passport, Opcode and some other music startups, and it I had the sufficient time, the last thing I would want to do is just clone Ableton. My hope is that some effort will come along to total re-invent what and how a music creation and production app should be. I often times feel we hit "Peak DAW" over 20 years ago.
Aldipower 1 days ago [-]
Real-time audio is a concern of the operating system and drivers primarily.
efficax 1 days ago [-]
nonsense. you have to be very careful in designing audio software. the entire soundchain has to compute within the buffer window or you WILL get bad stuttering output. you can choose slow responsivesness or extreme optimization, and for real time performance only optimization works.
adzm 1 days ago [-]
Additionally there are lookahead options in some effects that requires some delay, and clock sync for midi devices
Aldipower 1 days ago [-]
This isn't mutual exclusive to my statement, so, please don't be so offensive and call it nonsense.
dist-epoch 1 days ago [-]
There are many kinds of Real Time Audio.
If you just do "computer music", with no synced live instruments and external synths, it's a much easier problem, 40 ms of latency is perfectly fine, and on modern hardware it's not hard to hit that target.
idelnl 1 days ago [-]
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.
lemp 23 hours ago [-]
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.
idelnl 4 hours ago [-]
an insane amount in the first ten years. They went from quirky tracker to modern DAW. Since ~2015 I kinda can't tell the difference between versions. Which is fine for me! Keeps it an invisible tool I don't have to think about. Believe they shifted focus to developing plugins.
Morromist 19 hours ago [-]
It has evolved a lot since I bought it. They seem to be trying to integrate AI now, which is interesting, although its not much yet.
cowlevel 12 hours ago [-]
Paying for new things is not unethical.
butlike 1 days ago [-]
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.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
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.
DANmode 1 days ago [-]
New sales, smart spending and low overhead.
Not everything has to be a billion-dollar swing.
Not everything should!
butlike 1 days ago [-]
Totally. I was just remarking that the electric bill comes every month, but revenue only comes once and was trying to reconcile that. I suppose after a critical mass there's runway to keep the lights on and cultivate new customers, though.
LluisGerard 1 days ago [-]
I think DAWs at the level of Ableton live are going to be hard to replicate, and at best, they will be a toy for not serious producers... Imagine working for 80 to 120 hours into a project that has 120 tracks and then the whole thing crashes on you. Not saying this cannot happen with Live (that's why it does backups on the background). What I'm saying is that companies like Ableton earn me more trust because I know they are serious about their work and more reliable.
I mean, vibecoded apps can be fine if you are editing just an image, or a small video you are editing for nothing serious, as a beginner, etc.. but for people that is serious about making videos or making songs that take a lot of effort and time, paying 159 euros to upgrade every 3 to 4 years is a no-brainer (I already pre-ordered it).
crucialfelix 1 days ago [-]
I worked at Ableton for a bit. They were telling me about users that play 12 hour sets and absolutely must not crash or make any mistake. And it needs to never lose a feature or drop support for just about anything. They learn from every crash and make it a priority. When it does crash, you can restart and it can recover even your unsaved changes.
Marazan 19 hours ago [-]
> And it needs to never lose a feature or drop support for just about anything.
There are probably still musicians running stuff of their Atari STs at the heart of their studio. People don't truly understand the meaning of "legacy" until they see professional music hardware/software setups.
claysmithr 14 hours ago [-]
The problem with ableton is that a bad plugin or max device can take down the entire DAW, making it not very live friendly unfortunetely
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
I think the assets (the sounds) are the bigger barrier to entry.
tgv 1 days ago [-]
There's a lot of code under the surface that you'll never know about unless you happen to need it. It will be really hard write a prompt that recreates all functionality.
And I agree that the assets are a big barrier. If you look at Logic Pro X (my tool): it needs some 80GB for the full install without getting anything else. And without other software, you can expand it with extra loops and sample packs. I guess the interface to those can be reverse-engineered, but even that's a barrier.
grvdrm 1 days ago [-]
I think a one-shot (if that's what you're suggesting) clone is somewhat unrealistic. I agree with you.
On the other hand, refining/tweaking over time may get you closer. I'm quite far down this road, having created a DAW of my own flavor.
It's absolutely not perfect, nor is it a production-level app or even clone, but I trust it for electronic music production because it, like many other programs, does the basics well.
That's another point worth making about the assets. They're a barrier as someone builds them over time. You might have 2000 (example) custom presets and audio file alterations in Ableton and use them as your "sound" as a producer.
Thinking names like Kaskade, Deadmau5, etc. Plenty of others.
Going back to the code, reverb is the example that illuminates the difficulty of cloning in my day-to-day. Sometimes quite explicit in songs, and sometimes hiding just enough in the background. But IMO - stands out immediately when it sounds "off" as I lack a better description.
Anyhow, here's my song from my DAW in case you're curious! Note that it's not mastered so you'll need to crank your volume somewhat.
The main argument to me in creating your own DAW is that you have some workflow that simply can't be done with the other tools. Otherwise, you are going to spend massive amounts of time just to replicate Ableton 1.0, let alone Live 13.
Thanks for sharing the song. This is material proof that your program can generate a composition. Did you come up with some new ideas about how to create and produce?
grvdrm 1 days ago [-]
I don't think I have anything groundbreaking yet.
Blending lots of ideas from other places (unsurprising I'm sure). I first used FL Studio, and am more recently an owner of Ableton. Some things I like and dislike about both, so what I tried to do with my app is blend what I like.
E.g. FL Studio = step sequencer. Ableton = more intuitive (I think) for whole song composition. Of course, now Live 13 has a Step Sequencer...
The other areas I'm exploring is sound design. One goal in this effort is to remove dependencies on other tools as much as possible. So every sound you heard in my song is from the app alone - not some external sample or other synth/VST tool.
So, then suppose you sit down with a blank slate and draw a wave. Preview it. Now add bits and pieces on top. But more of a visual design canvas rather than the Reason-style rack wiring.
PS: Thank you for checking out the song!
diskzero 1 days ago [-]
How did you implement the side-chain compression? (I think I am hearing that.) We can also move offline of HN if you would rather discuss there. gene at semitone dot audio.
grvdrm 1 days ago [-]
Happy to do both!
But answering here if I understand correctly: I use (at the moment) a mostly serial chain architecture.
I think what you're asking is whether I'm using signals from one instrument (or other component) to drive another. Not as much as a first class feature similar to what you'd find in Ableton.
So, for example, I don't have today something that will drive low-pass cutoff frequency on a synth based on the kick drum sine wave decay.
Same idea you're mentioning?
On my list to get to but not there yet! I tend to add things as they come up in the process of making music, rather than approach this as a software-first-music-second project.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
And in your experience, what is harder? Sound design or coding the app?
I mean there are some sounds in the public domain or things that you can synthesize yourself. But I'm talking about the basic sounds that people ahve come to expect from DAWs, like TR808 or 909. You probably don't have those, have your own versions which don't sound quite right, or versions you cannot redistribute in a DAW. If you have solid versions please tell me, because I would like to learn.
BTW I'm not saying YOUR app needs those for YOUR purposes but I'm asking to help clarify my original claim that the sound design will be the bigger bottleneck.
grvdrm 1 days ago [-]
In a moment in time when I can code (with help of AI) - code isn't my progress blocker.
Sound design is laborious. My understanding (perhaps wrong) is the TR808/909 sounds are high-quality audio samples that the DAW maker licenses.
I'm slowly picking apart the 808/909 sounds to attempt to get close, but if I'm being honest, I don't love those sounds as the basis for everything I'm doing! My way of saying "my versions that don't sound right"
So - I spend more time on what I create from scratch!
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
If you can point me to somewhere that you can just buy 808/909 sounds to distribute in a DAW please let me know, but everything I've seen is basciallyjust limited to making music. As far as I know Ableton, etc. have (or work with) actual sound designers which either create samples from the actual hardware or they re-create them digitally. Which is what LLM's try to do but fail at.
To be clear, I think sounds synthesized by LLMs and public domain stuff goes a very long way. But when you want to create something very specific you're going to run into a wall. Same for 3d models, video, etc.
grvdrm 21 hours ago [-]
That sounds right. I have no first-hand knowledge. Also don't have a source for you re: 808/909 stuff. Sorry!
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
>There's a lot of code under the surface that you'll never know about unless you happen to need it.
Oh I'm sure - but that's not the weakness of an LLM. An LLM can handle all sorts of complicated signal processing.
It cannot reproduce the sound of a 808. And if you give it a benchmark and a candidate it cannot hear the difference in a meaningful way nor determine if it sounds "good." It cannot do it. Only a person with extensive domain experience can.
brokenmachine 18 hours ago [-]
I disagree. There are millions of sound packs available, including free ones.
When I think of a DAW, I think of the interface, the VST support, and the built in plugins.
I have so many sound assets that I've accumulated over the years, I don't need or want more.
Not saying it wouldn't be important to some people, but that's not important to me and I don't think I'm alone.
1 days ago [-]
Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
If you’re determined you can always buy packs and such. It’s really that stability and QoL/tooling you’re paying for. If your program is crashing multiple times every session - not to mention sometimes losing your work - it’s just going to kill any drive you have to create. And as you track more and more things, the ability to navigate all those tracks becomes even more critical, because eventually you will just become overwhelmed with what’s in front of you and the inability to move through it.
Adobe not withstanding none of these programs are ever that expensive either. I understand everyone has a different budget but if you can’t scrape together $100-$300 to buy essential software for something you want to do, then you probably have bigger issues on your plate. Hell, reaper is what? $40?
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
>If you’re determined you can always buy packs and such.
Im talking about what the biggest barrier will be to developing a DAW with LLMs. Buying the sounds doesnt let you redistribute them like that, you need commercial redistribution / software-embedding rights. The sounds people demand are going to be a bigger barrier than an agent coding it.
Your options are
1. synthesize the sounds yourself in code. LLMs aren't very good at this. Try it - you will play your sound next to a real TR808 recording and and think "this isnt even close".
2. Record a real machine yourself. Expensive and outside the domain of someone who only has coding experience. And with the 909 there may not even technically be a legal way to do it since some of the sounds are recorded and stored on the device, so you are essentially copy their recording. Many DAWs do do this but its murky.
3. License samples from a sound company. Normal sound pack licenses only cover making music with the sounds, not distributing them in a DAW. You’d need a custom OEM deal (contacting the company, negotiating, paying probably a lot, lawyer to check contract, etc).
4. License directly from Roland (not a thing as far as I know)
You need a real sound designer. But you could make a serviceable DAW with an LLM without having experience writing DAWs.
This is the same problem seen elsewhere, like video games. AI can do the code. It's the media that it can't really understand and someone without domain experience doesn't have the expertise, and doesnt even know what they don't know.
Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
That’s a very good point. I was thinking in terms of sound packs that users need
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
Im actually not super familiar with DAWS but perhaps some actually dont ship these sounds with and rely on plugins? In which case the user can just fetch free/licensed ones to make their music and the DAW doesnt have to ship it.
Maybe I'm undercutting my own point - I thought DAWs typically had these sorts of sounds but now that I think about it I recall hearing that sometimes people use plugins for this sort of thing.
Forgeties79 23 hours ago [-]
Nah you have the right of it.
swerner 1 days ago [-]
That’s what you’re buying Live for?
amarko 20 hours ago [-]
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.
claysmithr 19 hours ago [-]
I'm working with a small group of people to vibe code an Open Source GPL3 egui rust DAW with a similar workflow to ableton, available for MacOS, Linux, and Windows.
It's very alpha software right now of course, but is natively supporting plugin sandboxing, ARA, MCP, NAM (Neural Amp Modeler), VST3, VST2, CLAP, Sample Maps, and more.
I think before mcp it should have 1:1 CLI feature parity. and documentation for each feature.
That way i can generate chord progression, record audio, have access to the clock, slice, apply effects.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
The hard part will be getting the sounds right. There are some that are public domain but to reach parity would need someone who knows audio.
1 days ago [-]
yboris 1 days ago [-]
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.
semolino 1 days ago [-]
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.
sma3in 16 hours ago [-]
I have dual boot setup and Ableton is the only software keeping me running Windows. I tried out Bitwig, seems great but I got too comfortable with Ableton that it's really hard to switch. I really hope we get a Linux version in the future.
richrichardsson 1 days ago [-]
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.
davepeck 1 days ago [-]
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 workaround is to keep high latency plugins 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 (and new UI confusion?) 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.
bfmalky 1 days ago [-]
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.
climech 1 days ago [-]
Same in Chromium on Debian, tab dies completely with "Aw, Snap; error code 4", whatever that means
butlike 1 days ago [-]
If you expand the videos, they start the background starts to flicker and strobe (Dia; chromium)
TheGoddessInari 1 days ago [-]
Had the same problem on Firefox on Android: I think the page may just be that heavy...
CupricTea 1 days ago [-]
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 that plugin's UI separately. This update makes me feel I made the right choice by going with FL Studio years back.
brokenmachine 18 hours ago [-]
I agree with you but just wanted to say that Wavetable is really good.
OSC, MCP, and GUI on macOS are integrated, as well as audio analysis. PRs welcome!
exabrial 18 hours ago [-]
Ableton, sometime, Linux would be killer. Thanks a ton tho!
monster_truck 20 hours ago [-]
So lame to gate ARA 2 behind another paid update. None of these other changes are especially big, they seem tacked on to try and justify the version bump behind this API tax.
earthnail 9 hours ago [-]
I disagree. Lots of quality of life updates that I really appreciate and have wished for for a long time.
aizk 23 hours ago [-]
What's the current status of combining mcps / ais into ableton? What about some sort of source control / git for managing my music projects? Having my llms would make things amazing.
jawns 1 days ago [-]
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?
adzm 1 days ago [-]
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!
cruano 1 days ago [-]
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.
They bumped it from 8 tracks? Hey that's pretty cool (though, I always kinda liked that Ableton Lite was just an 8-track player)
CorpoZoomie 19 hours ago [-]
+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.
asimovDev 1 days ago [-]
If they like Garage Band already, why not Logic Studio which is a “grown up” version of Garage Band?
zabriel_goss 1 days ago [-]
I'd advocate for this as well. It's not hard to switch between DAWs, but if they are already familiar, they'll enjoy Logic.
bradreaves2 1 days ago [-]
I recommend GP just ask what kinds of things they might want. Or for a budding musician, a music store gift card would be really appreciated. I recommend Sweetwater (in the US.)
DAWs and MIDI controllers are sort of like keyboards, notebooks, or text editors. They all do the same things, but when they're your primary work surface little idiosyncrasies add up to flow-wrecking annoyances.
Lots of people love Logic, but I'm not one of them. It's not anything wrong with the product, it's just that Live clicks with my brain in a way that Logic doesn't. The Live interface has things arranged where I expect them to be. Logic hides everything in drawers.
That said, your teenager might be using Garage Band because they really like it, or they might use it because it's free and what they have. On the controller side, if they have experience with piano, they probably want a keyboard. If they don't, they might or might not want piano keys. If they do play piano, they will have preferences about key feel and size. My old piano muscle memory can't handle mini keyboards, for example.
morbicer 1 days ago [-]
Eh, I find the workflow and UI of Logic clunky. I prefer Ableton, also there are more resources online and it's better for live performance. Second best for me would be Fruityloops.
throwa356262 1 days ago [-]
Lite is the "free" version, the first real edition is called "intro".
You get lite with hardware purchase or in some magazines.
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.
input_sh 1 days ago [-]
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.
6581 1 days ago [-]
Lite is far too limited and you can't buy it on its own anyway, it only comes included with various hardware. Intro is limited to 16 tracks, Garage Band to 32 tracks. There's various other limitations too. Ableton has generous educational pricing though (50% off).
butlike 1 days ago [-]
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.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
+1 to the other recommendations to get them Standard, Intro is pretty limited for an "upgrade" (coming from a daily user of Suite).
bxvvgd 1 days ago [-]
rutracker.net
ign0rant 1 days ago [-]
That website crashed my entire Android phone pretty badly
hoppp 1 days ago [-]
This website crashed my phone
IAmGraydon 1 days ago [-]
Instant buy for me as I’ve been an Ableton user for something like 20 years and can’t imagine a better environment for making music.
colkassad 1 days ago [-]
Probably my favorite piece of software, ever.
jachee 8 hours ago [-]
As someone who has done most of my little music production on step-sequence-based programs (like FastTracker back 30+ years ago) this might be the thing that finally gets me to try to learn Live.
nylonstrung 1 days ago [-]
As a long time Ableton user I can't help but be disappointed by how marginal the improvements are in each new version
This is stuff that honestly should have been in a free update
Bitwig is a bit better but I'm desperate for an actually good OSS DAW (Reaper is neither FOSS nor good IMO) even I have to make it myself eventually
cruano 1 days ago [-]
I had the same thought for this "What's new in Live 13", but to be fair they do seem to use minor versions to bring in new stuff. Version 12 got up to 12.4, and each of those minors got a significant amount of new things:
Not sure if this is the best way to market these things
recursive 24 hours ago [-]
Reaper not good? Say more.
_doctor_love 1 days ago [-]
I liked deadmau5 observation about Reaper: it might horrible, but if you learn it, you can do anything.
gnarlouse 15 hours ago [-]
these days, just wait for REAbleton.
hnews11 24 hours ago [-]
We need an AI-native DAW.
vanjajaja1 13 hours ago [-]
feels awkard seeing ableton 13 come out with 0 mention of how they plan to integrate with AI workflows. i guess this is somewhere between a sign that they want to stick with the anti-ai audience (see how you got downvoted), or their iteration time is slow and they couldn't adapt in this cycle (plausible from what I heard about their UI dev)
squidsoup 23 hours ago [-]
Suno already exists for people that want to LARP at musicianship.
dbbk 8 hours ago [-]
Suno Studio is a full DAW product
21 hours ago [-]
dbbk 8 hours ago [-]
You're gonna hate the answer but it's Suno. Suno Studio is maybe 25% of the way there and advancing.
Jtarii 1 days ago [-]
extremely badly made website
elliotdickison 1 days ago [-]
website crashed my iphone - took two reboots to recover
Capricorn2481 1 days ago [-]
It's been a while since I've been in the DAW space. I remember some controversy around the way Ableton implemented Plugin Delay Compensation. Every DAW has to handle this in their own way, and not everyone does it well, but I remember it being especially problematic for Ableton, where people were trashing it from afar just for this singular issue.
Is this still a thing? Does anyone remember if this was overblown or if it was a fair criticism? I believe FL Studio handled this way worse for a long time, but eventually fixed it.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
As a daily user of Ableton, I'm pretty excited about this. Especially the Capture Automation/Step Sequencer/Multiband rack types.
I'm not a fan boy of any companies or tools, but Live has continued to impress me with each release.
rpmisms 17 hours ago [-]
Ableton is utterly gorgeous software. That is all.
Fervicus 1 days ago [-]
Ableton Live might be great, but that's a terrible webpage.
zarmin 1 days ago [-]
i screamed from the hills for 15 years that they would never add ARA2. i'm thrilled to have finally been proven wrong.
KUBOMI 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
NDlurker 24 hours ago [-]
[dead]
TobiasJacob 1 days ago [-]
I'm almost a little bit disappointed agentic editing didn't find it's way into Ableton yet.
vectordust 1 days ago [-]
I'm personally glad to see they didn't add anything AI. Suno already exists for that market, IMO.
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.
theYipster 16 hours ago [-]
Looking at the largely negative reaction to Logic 13 with the AI assistant, I think Ableton made the right choice not to push generative AI into its DAW.
jleehn 1 days ago [-]
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.
holoduke 23 hours ago [-]
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.
prollings 1 days ago [-]
opposite feeling here.
squidsoup 23 hours ago [-]
That would destroy Ableton overnight.
te_chris 1 days ago [-]
There's a JS SDK which would probably be enough to DIY it
hsuduebc2 1 days ago [-]
Is there even any such software?
syntaxers 1 days ago [-]
The most recent release of Logic Pro has an Intelligent Assistant and also Splice released a new DAW called Splice Create that is agent-native.
Ajoha 11 hours ago [-]
The logic world is laughing about this service, results are bad. Also: Apple wants you for subscription now!
Yes. http://Tonos.music is the one I've been working on. Timber is a competitor that got $5m in funding from Adobe.
We seek to complement the user by giving them access to a mix and master engineer, not replacing them like with Suno. We've got a booth at MONO sf this weekend at the Midway in SF, come find us! if you're on the fence, email me for a promo code to the conference!
bryceneal 1 days ago [-]
How would you compare it to something like Landr or Ozone for mastering?
The problem I have with the AI mastering is it seems to be a bit clumsy with making the master fit the song. A lot of these tools just have simple buttons like "low, medium high", and seem to default to really squashing the dynamics to achieve maximum loudness. I have worked with both human mastering engineers and AI mastering, and I would say a decent human mastering engineer is noticeably better at feeling out the songs and finding the right balance.
fragmede 1 days ago [-]
We're focusing more on the mix down part as that's more objective and less subjective and Landr/Ozone already exist so we're not starting off specializing in mastering. With additional time/funding what I'd like to build is the ability to let the user specify a specific reference track and not
just an artist for the AI to use as a reference.
To your question though, it's a chatbot so tell it you want your track to sound like eg Polo and Pan, it'll look for ways to enhance it in their style rather than a simple small/medium/large knob. It'll load one of the built-in mastering chains and tweak the settings on those, or if you have a preference, you can tell it that too.
m00dy 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
amarko 20 hours ago [-]
As someone who has been working on a vibe-coded DAW (and keeping an eye on a bunch of others), no you absolutely cannot.
dkdbejwi383 1 days ago [-]
Go on then. If it's that easy, do it, sell it for 1/10th of the cost and make millions.
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.
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 conspires to make your decision really really easy.
If your budget constrains you to Garage Band -> Logic or Ableton Lite -> Standard, you will get more with the upgrade to Logic, especially if you rely on the instruments/presets that come with the DAW rather than 3rd party plugins. Note that you can't use the Scheme integration unless you buy Ableton Live Suite, which costs considerably more than Logic or Standard.
Either way, going to give this a go!
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.
They tried really hard to help me recover my work even without a license but weren’t able to. They then apologized and proceeded to give me a full Suite license for free. I couldn’t believe it, I mean this is serious professional software and I had never even been a customer. That showed me that they really stand behind their product. I was able to start making a living off of it and eventually when I could afford it I bought another license even though I didn’t really need it that badly, mostly as a thank you.
The team over there is great and so is the software.
Any Ableton Live users here that can chime in on how they solve that?
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.
They're the de-facto sample library for 90% of any commercial track you've listened to on the radio/spotify/tv. There are a few Fred Again and Sabrina Carpenter songs that are basically just one straight sample taken wholesale from them.
Had no idea they started as a version control system.
Surprised that 10 years later on there's still no industry juggernaut owning collab music production.
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.
that's exactly right, unfortunately. it's a bit of the wild-west the it comes to plugins/VSTs in terms of distribution.
and I agree, this feels like the sort of thing that should be pretty solvable, but I think there's a lot of hidden complexity in this problem space. Solving the "version control" aspect of this feels like it should be rather straightforward for a single user, involving multiple users with different Ableton Live versions, different plugins/VSTs (and different versions within those) is where things would undoubtedly get messy.
I do think there is a niche market for this sort of thing, however.
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.
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.
Now, is this a good idea? There is a lot to be said about having an upfront plan about the usage of effects and placement of parts on the soundstage and committing. This might be a lost art, as I keep seeing Pro Tools files with hundreds of tracks, with stacks and stacks of effects.
Plugins with (often intentional) indeterminism in them, variations in OS and CPU architecture, variations in how fast their CPU is (a billion plugins on a track may run smoothly for one person and destroy someone else's machine), variations in sample rate, etc. can subtly or substantially affect how something sounds.
And in general it just makes things way easier to share even ignoring the issues of getting people to install the same plugin at the same version and the IP issues.
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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
Vast majority of musicians use DAW, although some famously don't, e.g. Burial uses Sound Forge for his music.
Doesn't make much of a difference, as it still has audio recording, plus audio samples you can drag as loops or as drum machine sounds, and things like that, that are per project (not necessarily in the library).
Any vocals for example would be 32-bit float lossless tracks, usually multi-tracked too. And any variation of a track, whether midi/vst based or audio based, that you chose to render to a clip (a very standard workflow, saves cpu and allows you to do audio edits to that part), will also be backed by an audio file on disk. Same for every "frozen" track.
So it might be a DAW and not a purely audio editor, but it will still have lots of audio files it manages.
https://audiomovers.com/products/listento
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50441616
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/
Other DAW manufacturers could learn a lot from the Endlesss architecture.
Got the t-shirt .. ;)
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.)
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.
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 :)
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.
You can export full mixdown audio.
You can export stems.
You can export midi parts as midi.
You can export / save as the whole Live project.
Obviously it can't magically make someone else you share it with have the same third party plugins.
But if you stick to audio + the internal instrument and fx plugins, then your exported full project would be editable and playable as is for everybody you share it with that also has the same Live version.
IMO that's a better model for consumers since you do get something at the end of it. And if you are a professional, you were probably already getting the latest and greatest every time anyways.
[1] https://www.ableton.com/en/rent-to-own-ableton-live/
The model just works because you don’t need to upgrade constantly, it’s nothing like a subscription.
In general, for most DAW the whole subscription practices did not fully takeover like for other creative software like photography or video.
Ableton makes this extremely clear in:
https://www.ableton.com/en/live/compare-editions/
go through it and you'll see that Standard is the least you'd want, and Suite is a great deal.
To me it sounds like a subscription with all of the benefits, with none of the downsides, so basically not at all like a subscription, more like a loan you can take almost, as subscriptions are basically used by companies who want to extract as much "value" from users as they humanly and legally can.
> And if you are a professional, you were probably already getting the latest and greatest every time anyways.
I guess it depends on how much money you make, and where you live. Here in Spain, professional users of Ableton tend to be a version or two behind the latest (even a couple of months ago I saw someone using Ableton 10 still, its many years old), as it isn't a free upgrade, and musicians aren't exactly making a ton of cash.
Then most people using Ableton don't use all of Ableton, but parts of it. If you're not using it for sequencing, and the new version mostly have sequencing updates (just an example), then skipping upgrading makes a ton of sense.
Now, if Ableton ends up being acquired by a private equity firm, you may very well see a shift in their pricing model where extracting revenue from customers at the expense of product quality becomes primary.
If you have worked with any of the people currently, or formerly, running Ableton, you will know that they worked hard to regain their financial independence from their outside investors and I doubt becoming a predatory software subscription service is on their roadmap.
There is very little reason to upgrade to the latest versions IMO
That 'if' really is doing a lot of heavy lifting and I hope it really is nothing more than an 'if'. PE feels like the Sith in Star Wars, a dark force that works in the dark and wants to take everything that is good and extract money from it until it inevitably dies.
[1] https://rekall.machinelies.eu
I remember loving its basic effects: the (pingpong) delay, the reverb, the Eq, the compressor. And how easy it was to consolidate a track ander build further on top of it, cut it up, make a new instrument using it.
Great software
I tried running it with Wine but the experience wasn't great. And if it even worked, the VST's would be a whole new problem. So I dropped the hobby of digital musical production in favour of other hobbies
I'd love a Linux version, but I assume it would be useless because I doubt any VSTs would work with it.
I have not used Ableton in some time now and ... well I do appreciate having the option but really feel sick using Windows under any circumstances, Macos too now since about 2019.
I've considered trying it in a VM, but I know it'd be janky and probably unusable because of latency or some other issue.
https://learningmusic.ableton.com/ https://learningsynths.ableton.com/
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.
My advice, if you have the budget, get Standard and upgrade to Suite later (at a discount). Suite is _nice_ but it's really mostly bells and whistles that you don't "need" to get from Ableton. Suite has a ton of included sound packs and instruments that are certainly useful but may not be useful to you.
As for the Akai MPK Mini, that's going to be entirely subjective IMO. I've bought several midi controllers over the years, and I've settled on a few key pieces that I'm happy with. The Arturia KeyStep 37 is the perfect keyboard for my desktop. It has enough range in a compact form factor and doesn't have any features I don't need (I'm not affiliated with Arturia).
If you don't already have a midi keyboard, I would suggest grabbing an affordable one!
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.
https://maryspender.teachable.com/p/how-to-produce-music-in-...
The course follows Rachel teaching Mary (a musician but with no experience in Live), so you learn along with her. I think they might’ve done it in Live 11 so some little things might be different but on the whole I think it’s worth it.
Good luck with the music!
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.
The biggest difference with intro is that you are limited to 16 tracks, and some of the software plugins aren't present. If you are new to music production then this should hardly matter to you. You will be able to get a good sense of whether you enjoy working with Ableton or not, and you can always upgrade later.
Buy suite and the move if you can!
Yeah, I know... personal taste :)
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.
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
Also got to love JACK and pipewire to the point that nowadays MacOS feels archaic in comparisson.
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.
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...
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.
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
Also the Device slots overview in session view could be useful. I'm kind of excited guys, ngl
I’m working on two ARA-2 plugins so this is a small bit of good news.
It's still very unpolished, if you want to check it out, all feedback is welcome: https://minidaw.aykev.dev/
I should pick this project up again. It's a little daunting to build alone, but AI tools should make it much more managable than it was when I first got started.
The cost of audio (or any) software has been something people have been complaining about for decades. When I started in the audio software industry, the prices (amazingly!) were just as high or higher as the prices today. Some of this cost was due to physically creating boxes, manuals, storage media and paying to get the product into sales channels. Viewed historically, you might see that you are getting a much better deal today with Ableton for $300 than Opcode Studio Vision 1.0 in 1990 for $995. In 1990, you had to call into Opcode for support and there was no online community for support and information sharing.
It is real conundrum running a company that sells creative tools; the very users you want to bring in as new customers might be the ones that are the most resistant, or unable, to paying the full price. The industry has tried to come up with various ways to assist the people, including the $79 version of Ableton that you are not a fan of.
When you are actually deriving your income from the use of the product, the pricing becomes less of an issue and I clearly remember Warner Brothers buying dozens of copies of our software to support a Danny Elfman project because he was using our software. I also remember struggling composers begging for education pricing or even free copies of the software at our booth at the NAMM trade show.
FL Studio is not unprofessional noob software by any means. Ultimately, a talented singer, songwriter, composer, DJ, etc. will use any means they have on hand to be creative.
looking back at my order history, I upgraded from Live 10 Suite (purchased 2018) to Live 11 Suite for $245.60 in 2021 and again from 11 Suite to 12 Suite in 2024 for $245.60.
Everyone has a different financial situation, but for me this is entirely fair pricing for professional grade software that does not have a subscription that I use on an almost daily basis. I am happy to continue supporting Ableton, they respect me as a user and are consistent in their quality and output. (I don't use FL Studio, this is not a dig at that company/platform, just a happy Ableton user).
Leading with a step sequencer, automation recording, a loop mangler, and a basic drum synth in 2026 isn't pushing the creative limits of DAW design.
IMO Live is a tolerable product rather than an exciting one. Back in the days when I was making loop-based music I got more done more easily with Sonic Foundry's (then Sony's) Acid, which is still my gold standard for ease of use for that idiom.
And I still think Vegas is the best video editor I ever used.
I think with vibecoding the days of the big DAWs are numbered. A few years from now people are going to be rolling their own designs. We're going to see a lot of slopware, which won't matter because it's single-user, and some rare but incredibly inventive and inspiring completely new takes.
What they should really have is a demo version of the next tier up for when I'm considering upgrading. Say if I have Standard Edition, I click the "Try Suite" button and it temporarily unlocks the Suite features without overriding my base install. I can then easily decide to upgrade (or not), but the main issue is the next tier's features are locked behind an install, so people go into it with the mentality that they have to decide on a product tier when they're a noob and don't know anything about the product.
I've been making beats for about 20 years. For me music is essentially a diary that others occasionally read.
I'll never make a nickel off this.
Also if I buy a 2000$ microphone I own it forever and I can even sell it and maybe recoup half.
Vs paying 200$ a year forever.
Plus FL Studio is about 300$ once for the All Plugins edition.
You can easily get some older version and play around with that for free.
In my case I bought a launchpad many years ago and for a long time used the Ableton Lite version that came with it. Was more than enough for hobby usage.
I have no problem with paying for software I enjoy.
You don’t need to get the new major versions.
It’s also really easy to crack Ableton and use it for free if you just want to test it out - i think it’s part of their sales strategy tbh
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.
If you're connecting your machine to several physical effect pedals ... Then you probably need latency compensation.
It’s really surprisingly unforgiving, even on today’s machines.
I have heard people claim that ArtCraft are not using LLMs to generate their apps, but the presentation and code almost seem like someone gave their LLM agent the Reaper manual and asked it to produce a clone.
Their main tagline on the site is also strange "Professional audio recording and mixing, rebuilt in pure Rust." Really, who cares? No one I know in the performance, composition and recording industry cares at all. What they care about is reliability, stability, workflows and support. Yes, and price. But none of the flagship DAWs have onerous pricing and as others have pointed out, FL Studio has been a good investment over the years. If price is a concern, it is hard to beat Reaper in terms of value and functionality.
I am sure people will continue to one-shot or iterate clones of the leading DAWs and some people will try to use them and probably end up wasting their time on their productions when whoever is behind the project moves on. It is extremely hard work supporting any application and the users of MIDI, audio and notation software are extremely demanding.
My career started way back working on apps for companies like Passport, Opcode and some other music startups, and it I had the sufficient time, the last thing I would want to do is just clone Ableton. My hope is that some effort will come along to total re-invent what and how a music creation and production app should be. I often times feel we hit "Peak DAW" over 20 years ago.
If you just do "computer music", with no synced live instruments and external synths, it's a much easier problem, 40 ms of latency is perfectly fine, and on modern hardware it's not hard to hit that target.
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.
Not everything has to be a billion-dollar swing.
Not everything should!
I mean, vibecoded apps can be fine if you are editing just an image, or a small video you are editing for nothing serious, as a beginner, etc.. but for people that is serious about making videos or making songs that take a lot of effort and time, paying 159 euros to upgrade every 3 to 4 years is a no-brainer (I already pre-ordered it).
There are probably still musicians running stuff of their Atari STs at the heart of their studio. People don't truly understand the meaning of "legacy" until they see professional music hardware/software setups.
And I agree that the assets are a big barrier. If you look at Logic Pro X (my tool): it needs some 80GB for the full install without getting anything else. And without other software, you can expand it with extra loops and sample packs. I guess the interface to those can be reverse-engineered, but even that's a barrier.
On the other hand, refining/tweaking over time may get you closer. I'm quite far down this road, having created a DAW of my own flavor.
It's absolutely not perfect, nor is it a production-level app or even clone, but I trust it for electronic music production because it, like many other programs, does the basics well.
That's another point worth making about the assets. They're a barrier as someone builds them over time. You might have 2000 (example) custom presets and audio file alterations in Ableton and use them as your "sound" as a producer.
Thinking names like Kaskade, Deadmau5, etc. Plenty of others.
Going back to the code, reverb is the example that illuminates the difficulty of cloning in my day-to-day. Sometimes quite explicit in songs, and sometimes hiding just enough in the background. But IMO - stands out immediately when it sounds "off" as I lack a better description.
Anyhow, here's my song from my DAW in case you're curious! Note that it's not mastered so you'll need to crank your volume somewhat.
https://on.soundcloud.com/grJ3e8EAzMc87pFzLX
Thanks for sharing the song. This is material proof that your program can generate a composition. Did you come up with some new ideas about how to create and produce?
Blending lots of ideas from other places (unsurprising I'm sure). I first used FL Studio, and am more recently an owner of Ableton. Some things I like and dislike about both, so what I tried to do with my app is blend what I like.
E.g. FL Studio = step sequencer. Ableton = more intuitive (I think) for whole song composition. Of course, now Live 13 has a Step Sequencer...
The other areas I'm exploring is sound design. One goal in this effort is to remove dependencies on other tools as much as possible. So every sound you heard in my song is from the app alone - not some external sample or other synth/VST tool.
So, then suppose you sit down with a blank slate and draw a wave. Preview it. Now add bits and pieces on top. But more of a visual design canvas rather than the Reason-style rack wiring.
PS: Thank you for checking out the song!
But answering here if I understand correctly: I use (at the moment) a mostly serial chain architecture.
I think what you're asking is whether I'm using signals from one instrument (or other component) to drive another. Not as much as a first class feature similar to what you'd find in Ableton.
So, for example, I don't have today something that will drive low-pass cutoff frequency on a synth based on the kick drum sine wave decay.
Same idea you're mentioning?
On my list to get to but not there yet! I tend to add things as they come up in the process of making music, rather than approach this as a software-first-music-second project.
I mean there are some sounds in the public domain or things that you can synthesize yourself. But I'm talking about the basic sounds that people ahve come to expect from DAWs, like TR808 or 909. You probably don't have those, have your own versions which don't sound quite right, or versions you cannot redistribute in a DAW. If you have solid versions please tell me, because I would like to learn.
BTW I'm not saying YOUR app needs those for YOUR purposes but I'm asking to help clarify my original claim that the sound design will be the bigger bottleneck.
Sound design is laborious. My understanding (perhaps wrong) is the TR808/909 sounds are high-quality audio samples that the DAW maker licenses.
I'm slowly picking apart the 808/909 sounds to attempt to get close, but if I'm being honest, I don't love those sounds as the basis for everything I'm doing! My way of saying "my versions that don't sound right"
So - I spend more time on what I create from scratch!
To be clear, I think sounds synthesized by LLMs and public domain stuff goes a very long way. But when you want to create something very specific you're going to run into a wall. Same for 3d models, video, etc.
Oh I'm sure - but that's not the weakness of an LLM. An LLM can handle all sorts of complicated signal processing.
It cannot reproduce the sound of a 808. And if you give it a benchmark and a candidate it cannot hear the difference in a meaningful way nor determine if it sounds "good." It cannot do it. Only a person with extensive domain experience can.
When I think of a DAW, I think of the interface, the VST support, and the built in plugins.
I have so many sound assets that I've accumulated over the years, I don't need or want more.
Not saying it wouldn't be important to some people, but that's not important to me and I don't think I'm alone.
Adobe not withstanding none of these programs are ever that expensive either. I understand everyone has a different budget but if you can’t scrape together $100-$300 to buy essential software for something you want to do, then you probably have bigger issues on your plate. Hell, reaper is what? $40?
Im talking about what the biggest barrier will be to developing a DAW with LLMs. Buying the sounds doesnt let you redistribute them like that, you need commercial redistribution / software-embedding rights. The sounds people demand are going to be a bigger barrier than an agent coding it.
Your options are
1. synthesize the sounds yourself in code. LLMs aren't very good at this. Try it - you will play your sound next to a real TR808 recording and and think "this isnt even close".
2. Record a real machine yourself. Expensive and outside the domain of someone who only has coding experience. And with the 909 there may not even technically be a legal way to do it since some of the sounds are recorded and stored on the device, so you are essentially copy their recording. Many DAWs do do this but its murky.
3. License samples from a sound company. Normal sound pack licenses only cover making music with the sounds, not distributing them in a DAW. You’d need a custom OEM deal (contacting the company, negotiating, paying probably a lot, lawyer to check contract, etc).
4. License directly from Roland (not a thing as far as I know)
You need a real sound designer. But you could make a serviceable DAW with an LLM without having experience writing DAWs.
This is the same problem seen elsewhere, like video games. AI can do the code. It's the media that it can't really understand and someone without domain experience doesn't have the expertise, and doesnt even know what they don't know.
Maybe I'm undercutting my own point - I thought DAWs typically had these sorts of sounds but now that I think about it I recall hearing that sometimes people use plugins for this sort of thing.
https://suhina.org/
It's very alpha software right now of course, but is natively supporting plugin sandboxing, ARA, MCP, NAM (Neural Amp Modeler), VST3, VST2, CLAP, Sample Maps, and more.
Come join us in discord! :)
https://discord.gg/rgwp4DDNsU
That way i can generate chord progression, record audio, have access to the clock, slice, apply effects.
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 that plugin's UI separately. This update makes me feel I made the right choice by going with FL Studio years back.
OSC, MCP, and GUI on macOS are integrated, as well as audio analysis. PRs welcome!
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/
DAWs and MIDI controllers are sort of like keyboards, notebooks, or text editors. They all do the same things, but when they're your primary work surface little idiosyncrasies add up to flow-wrecking annoyances.
Lots of people love Logic, but I'm not one of them. It's not anything wrong with the product, it's just that Live clicks with my brain in a way that Logic doesn't. The Live interface has things arranged where I expect them to be. Logic hides everything in drawers.
That said, your teenager might be using Garage Band because they really like it, or they might use it because it's free and what they have. On the controller side, if they have experience with piano, they probably want a keyboard. If they don't, they might or might not want piano keys. If they do play piano, they will have preferences about key feel and size. My old piano muscle memory can't handle mini keyboards, for example.
You get lite with hardware purchase or in some magazines.
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209775685-Get-a-L...
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.
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.
This is stuff that honestly should have been in a free update
Bitwig is a bit better but I'm desperate for an actually good OSS DAW (Reaper is neither FOSS nor good IMO) even I have to make it myself eventually
https://www.ableton.com/en/release-notes/live-12/
Not sure if this is the best way to market these things
Is this still a thing? Does anyone remember if this was overblown or if it was a fair criticism? I believe FL Studio handled this way worse for a long time, but eventually fixed it.
I'm not a fan boy of any companies or tools, but Live has continued to impress me with each release.
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.
We seek to complement the user by giving them access to a mix and master engineer, not replacing them like with Suno. We've got a booth at MONO sf this weekend at the Midway in SF, come find us! if you're on the fence, email me for a promo code to the conference!
The problem I have with the AI mastering is it seems to be a bit clumsy with making the master fit the song. A lot of these tools just have simple buttons like "low, medium high", and seem to default to really squashing the dynamics to achieve maximum loudness. I have worked with both human mastering engineers and AI mastering, and I would say a decent human mastering engineer is noticeably better at feeling out the songs and finding the right balance.
To your question though, it's a chatbot so tell it you want your track to sound like eg Polo and Pan, it'll look for ways to enhance it in their style rather than a simple small/medium/large knob. It'll load one of the built-in mastering chains and tweak the settings on those, or if you have a preference, you can tell it that too.