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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Wish they would add Linux support. What is the best option for Linux?

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?

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.

The style of marketing page does not live up to the software's quality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That website crashed my entire Android phone pretty badly

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.

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?

Finally ARA-2 support!

I’m working on two ARA-2 plugins so this is a small bit of good news.

website crashed my iphone - took two reboots to recover

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.

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.

extremely badly made website

Ableton Live might be great, but that's a terrible webpage.

[flagged]

I'm almost a little bit disappointed agentic editing didn't find it's way into Ableton yet.

I can easily clone this software in a week.