People here might be interested to know that you can run Scheme (lisp) code directly in Ableton through my Scheme for Max project in Max for Live.
S4M is an open source extension to Max that allows you to run the s7 Scheme interpreter in a Max object, similar to the JS object in Max. Advantages over JS are that in can run in the high priority scheduler thread, enabling accurate timing, it has direct access to the file system from Scheme code, and allows you to make Scheme s-expressions directly in Max messages. It is also a very nice way to control the Live API, as the live API works on lists of symbols.
Are any of the schemes/lisps for music specifically worth checking out. I know there is CLM Common Lisp Music and it seems in general the language family would be a good fit
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.
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?
> 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.
This is a pain point for me as well, but I'm not sure what solving this would truly look like. At the moment whenever I'm collaborating with anyone else, one of us will have the "primary" project file containing the entire mix/session, and the collaborator will be sent all stems individually, and they'll send their stems back for ingest in to the main project. It's pretty clunky, but it prevents the awkward "I don't have that plugin/VST/etc" issues that passing project files has.
I dream of a git-like workflow for Ableton, ideally with some sort of clever solve for the inevitable missing device issue (maybe freezing could solve this with some tweaks?).
I'm also curious to hear from others on how they solve this, especially when collaborating remotely.
This is very solvable in theory, we've been doing package management and version control in software for decades. I'm not familiar with the plugin/VST ecosystem enough but I'm assuming there's no real central registry ala pypi/maven/npm?
> 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.
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.
I rememeber trying blend.io and Splice studio back in the day, but they weren't too ergonomic due to lack of a 'project package' convention. There also was an inkling of native sharing for a while [0]:
> Officially, it was known as "Ableton Link Share" during early development and then launched as “Ableton Live’s ‘Share’ feature” — introduced around Live 9.1 (2013–2015 era).
> It allowed users to upload their Live Sets directly from Ableton Live to a personal web page (via ableton.com) to share projects with others — including audio previews and downloadable Live Sets.
> Ableton eventually discontinued the Share feature in 2017, citing limited use and the shift in focus toward Ableton Cloud / Splice / Link integration as alternative collaboration tools.
It seems to me that the super customizable, plug-in heavy architecture of modern DAWs.. especially Ableton makes collaboration almost impossible, at least without a change in IP/licensing model.
Right. How often are you collaborating with users who agree to only use vanilla Ableton plugins? Every time I've collaborated we have to start the conversation with what plugins we share, which ones are freely available, which ones would are not cost prohibitive for the other side to acquire, and so on.
That said, I think that vanilla Ableton provides a whole lot to collaborate with. Maybe there are a lot of people for whom the base set works, but "do you have Apollo UAD + the Neve preamp plugin?" or something like it is not a rare occurrence.
Why aren't you bouncing stems? You bounce the stems, they load them into their DAW, make edits with whatever tools they want, then bounce them out again. There's no need to transfer around whole projects...
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.
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.
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.
An easy way to share a project with collaborators. This is obviously hard because of the gazillion VSTs and multiple platforms that Live supports, but if I could just share the bare bones project (channels, tempo, and all built-in plugins that all Live users have) it would already be an improvement over the current situation.
In terms of workflow I can imagine a "shared project" view in Live that loads the shared bare bones project file and allows you to easily lay your own tracks on top (with whatever VSTs you have installed locally), and then allows you to freeze and share those recordings as audio in one go, in the shared project.
Question: what happens when you share a project made on a Mac version of Ableton with a windows user? All of the internal pathing in Project.xls will be macOS paths. It's not as simple as sharing a bare-bones project. Bounce stems.
I have worked on the code of legacy applications like MasterTracks Pro, Studio Vison and SAW and my opinion would be that you need to start from the ground up with collaboration as the guiding light. The existing applications have workflows and data models that are very monolithic and tied into the concept of a single user, using a single application with application logic and workflows implemented in code. That code sometime exposes functionality through scripting dictionaries or plugin APIs, but the this is backward in my opinion.
Other commenters have stated what a pain it is to just get two environments in sync. A complex production will have tons of plugins, various MIDI and audio interfaces, differing outboard gear and other variables that make life hard when sharing files.
You also have asset management issues; where are the audio stems, vocal tracks, library resources, etc. stored and how are they shared.
If you want to collaborate in real-time, then there is another layer of technical challenges.
I have been working on a system that is influenced from my earlier experience building audio tools for earlier generations of sequencers and DAWs, rendering pipelines for Dreamworks and configuration management systems for Amazon. I feel you really need a system that uses a DSL and all operations are defined at that level. There shouldn't be anything you can do in the user interface that isn't available at the DSL level. You can then think about techniques used in Docker, k8s, etc. to define and deploy both the environment and the interpretation of the DSL in the user interface.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really liked the DAW itself, but how does it handle VST's? I tried setting my studio up on Linux with Bitwig a while ago and it was causing me a lot of pain and I gave up. Ableton is the only reason I still keep a dual-boot.
VSTs work perfectly fine in Bitwig. Whether a plugin supports linux is a different question though. I've tried to run windows VSTs via yabridge under linux but that was barely usable.
Yes, I remember trying to set up Omnisphere and it just wouldn't work for me. So my issues were related to windows VST's. I used Wine and yabridge, which did install them but they weren't usable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe timing is the wrong word. Latency is definitely a related concern.
If something needs to fire every 1209 ms then it can't get fired in 1232 ms this time and then 1198 ms next time. Maybe a better term would be clock jitter or drift?
As I understand it, a DAW needs something close to a RTOS.
I 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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 .
I'm forever puzzled why the effects ribbon at the bottom is UI-locked to be so tiny - it could easily span double its height to allow you to see all your filters without needing to scroll horizontally.
I could be wrong about this, but I think it's because devices are designed with a fixed layout and are not responsive. Potentially every device's layout would need to be rebuilt to support resizing of the bottom ribbon.
Still seems they're ignoring to fix PDC mid-chain though. It's the one thing I check to see if they bothered with on every release, but I won't hold my breath.
That’s obscure but we’re on HN so I’m here for it. Live isn’t alone here; you won’t find mid-chain delay compensation in other prominent DAWs either, for instance Logic Pro. The usual workaround is to keep high latency plugins either later in your chains, or put them on separate returns. A real fix would probably require every device to get its own offset clock. That could be a lot of under-the-hood work (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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FL Studio is the most ethically licensed software I've ever used. In 2002, I paid $150 and have received lifetime updates since then. No ads, no renewal fees, no nerfing of my license to push me into a higher tier. Just the latest version every time it came out, from v3.4 to v26.
Contrast w/ Ableton, where you pay about that much every upgrade. Or something egregious like Adobe.
I'm actually rooting for FL Studio to NOT be cloned, respect to the way they ran their business, hope people pay them their money.
IS the idea that as the population increases, you'll always have a larger market share in in the future than you do now? Kind of like human inflation? If it's not that, I just don't see how they can keep the lights on month after month, year after year with single licenses.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
If you buy them a midi keyboard or controller it will usually come with a lite or introductory license. The push is fun but a real keyboard feels special and the pads and sliders and knobs really make Live feel like a real instrument rather than just a piece of software
That said you do get a ton of cool stuff with the higher editions
A subscription to splice or other sample/preset libraries opens up a world of possibilities as well
Having the full edition also makes it possible to use more of the example projects and templates out there, and you can follow along with the tutorials from Mr Bill too!
This is the best option by far. Lite/Intro is currently $80 on sale, but for $10-$20 more, you can get an MPK mini [1] which includes it. That version is limited to 16 tracks, but I mean... that was enough for most people up until the 90s.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Very cool will check this out more
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.
[1] https://www.ableton.com/en/rent-to-own-ableton-live/
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?
>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.
There is a this live collaboration project: https://api-production-006c.up.railway.app/
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.
This is a pain point for me as well, but I'm not sure what solving this would truly look like. At the moment whenever I'm collaborating with anyone else, one of us will have the "primary" project file containing the entire mix/session, and the collaborator will be sent all stems individually, and they'll send their stems back for ingest in to the main project. It's pretty clunky, but it prevents the awkward "I don't have that plugin/VST/etc" issues that passing project files has.
I dream of a git-like workflow for Ableton, ideally with some sort of clever solve for the inevitable missing device issue (maybe freezing could solve this with some tweaks?).
I'm also curious to hear from others on how they solve this, especially when collaborating remotely.
This is very solvable in theory, we've been doing package management and version control in software for decades. I'm not familiar with the plugin/VST ecosystem enough but I'm assuming there's no real central registry ala pypi/maven/npm?
> 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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=252909
It seems to me that the super customizable, plug-in heavy architecture of modern DAWs.. especially Ableton makes collaboration almost impossible, at least without a change in IP/licensing model.
Right. How often are you collaborating with users who agree to only use vanilla Ableton plugins? Every time I've collaborated we have to start the conversation with what plugins we share, which ones are freely available, which ones would are not cost prohibitive for the other side to acquire, and so on.
That said, I think that vanilla Ableton provides a whole lot to collaborate with. Maybe there are a lot of people for whom the base set works, but "do you have Apollo UAD + the Neve preamp plugin?" or something like it is not a rare occurrence.
Why aren't you bouncing stems? You bounce the stems, they load them into their DAW, make edits with whatever tools they want, then bounce them out again. There's no need to transfer around whole projects...
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.
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.
I always thought they'd eventually implement some sort of version control, ideally git based, or a timeline similar to Fusion360.
I meant to reply to you here but managed to post a comment of my own
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50441616
version control for it hmmmmmmmm
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.
What would you envision?
An easy way to share a project with collaborators. This is obviously hard because of the gazillion VSTs and multiple platforms that Live supports, but if I could just share the bare bones project (channels, tempo, and all built-in plugins that all Live users have) it would already be an improvement over the current situation.
In terms of workflow I can imagine a "shared project" view in Live that loads the shared bare bones project file and allows you to easily lay your own tracks on top (with whatever VSTs you have installed locally), and then allows you to freeze and share those recordings as audio in one go, in the shared project.
Question: what happens when you share a project made on a Mac version of Ableton with a windows user? All of the internal pathing in Project.xls will be macOS paths. It's not as simple as sharing a bare-bones project. Bounce stems.
I have worked on the code of legacy applications like MasterTracks Pro, Studio Vison and SAW and my opinion would be that you need to start from the ground up with collaboration as the guiding light. The existing applications have workflows and data models that are very monolithic and tied into the concept of a single user, using a single application with application logic and workflows implemented in code. That code sometime exposes functionality through scripting dictionaries or plugin APIs, but the this is backward in my opinion.
Other commenters have stated what a pain it is to just get two environments in sync. A complex production will have tons of plugins, various MIDI and audio interfaces, differing outboard gear and other variables that make life hard when sharing files.
You also have asset management issues; where are the audio stems, vocal tracks, library resources, etc. stored and how are they shared.
If you want to collaborate in real-time, then there is another layer of technical challenges.
I have been working on a system that is influenced from my earlier experience building audio tools for earlier generations of sequencers and DAWs, rendering pipelines for Dreamworks and configuration management systems for Amazon. I feel you really need a system that uses a DSL and all operations are defined at that level. There shouldn't be anything you can do in the user interface that isn't available at the DSL level. You can then think about techniques used in Docker, k8s, etc. to define and deploy both the environment and the interpretation of the DSL in the user interface.
Wow, SAW… there’s a name from the past.
Wasn’t that the one written in assembler? Kudos!
Yes. It helped to basically write your own operating system to work around kernel issues. Not really recommended though...
Amazingly, the website is still alive: https://www.sawstudio.com/products_sawstudio.htm I am not brave enough to download and try it out.
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
I liked deadmau5 observation about Reaper: it might horrible, but if you learn it, you can do anything.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
It's because they grew up playing with Fischer Technik.
They really do a good job especially considering how much complexity is contained within Ableton.
Dunno... but coming from Studio One, I find Ableton’s interface very off-putting and ugly.
Yeah, I know... personal taste :)
I actually much prefer FL Studio UI over Ableton's
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.
Agreed, it's really intuitive (or it was for me). I feel like it has just the right learning curve, it just makes sense.
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.
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.
Fl studio browser was the biggest turnoff for me.
100% agreed, gold standard in creative software design
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.
Wish they would add Linux support. What is the best option for Linux?
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.
I really liked the DAW itself, but how does it handle VST's? I tried setting my studio up on Linux with Bitwig a while ago and it was causing me a lot of pain and I gave up. Ableton is the only reason I still keep a dual-boot.
VSTs work perfectly fine in Bitwig. Whether a plugin supports linux is a different question though. I've tried to run windows VSTs via yabridge under linux but that was barely usable.
Was that some time ago? I find Yabridge to work reliably on numerous plugins.
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.
I didn't face any VST related issues on linux.
+1 bitwig. It's so fun
+2 as a beginner in Ableton and Bitwig, I'm a bigger fan of Bitwig.
Best for hobbyist goofing around. Which is me ( and pbly most ppl here)
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.
Ironically they added linux support... for Live Push 3. It runs an headless x86 version of the desktop suite ported to linux.
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
Bitwig is the closest (and in many ways superior)
There's also this project:
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.
Studio One has Linux support for non-open source and it's been around for longer than Bitwig.
For open source, Ardour but yeah...
Tracktion has always appealed to me.
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.
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.
> 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.
Linux can run specific apps with realtime priority since 6.12. Just gotta configure your audio stack to run that way.
pipewire-jack adapter is good enough for me to use PC as a guitar pedal with guitarix and maudio sound interface.
You might need to tweak kernel settings for better latency https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio#Optimizi...
Reaper
Ardour
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.
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
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?
Ableton's lessons, FabFilter's youtube channel. Start with Ableton Lite and go the upgrade route. In the past, usually if you bought a budget MIDI keyboard, you'd get a selection of entry-level DAWs included with that purchase. Ableton Lite was an option for the Alesis MIDI keyboard I bought. I'd suggest going that route.
I would start with Ableton's lessons, they're delightful.
https://learningmusic.ableton.com/ https://learningsynths.ableton.com/
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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 .
I'm forever puzzled why the effects ribbon at the bottom is UI-locked to be so tiny - it could easily span double its height to allow you to see all your filters without needing to scroll horizontally.
I could be wrong about this, but I think it's because devices are designed with a fixed layout and are not responsive. Potentially every device's layout would need to be rebuilt to support resizing of the bottom ribbon.
Still seems they're ignoring to fix PDC mid-chain though. It's the one thing I check to see if they bothered with on every release, but I won't hold my breath.
That’s obscure but we’re on HN so I’m here for it. Live isn’t alone here; you won’t find mid-chain delay compensation in other prominent DAWs either, for instance Logic Pro. The usual workaround is to keep high latency plugins either later in your chains, or put them on separate returns. A real fix would probably require every device to get its own offset clock. That could be a lot of under-the-hood work (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.
The style of marketing page does not live up to the software's quality.
They're trying to appeal to the younger generation.
It's made in Berlin and I guess you can see that on the page.
This website crashed my phone
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)
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.
Tough to teach a fish how to climb a tree.
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.
If you expand the videos, they start the background starts to flicker and strobe (Dia; chromium)
Same in Chromium on Debian, tab dies completely with "Aw, Snap; error code 4", whatever that means
Had the same problem on Firefox on Android: I think the page may just be that heavy...
I'm excited about the Transient shaper. Hopefully I can finally ditch my beefy SPL transient designer.
same here, it's kind of crazy that Ableton hasn't had a good option for shaping transients out of the box until now!
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.
Finally ARA-2 support!
I’m working on two ARA-2 plugins so this is a small bit of good news.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are already clones like https://github.com/storytold/soundcraft out there. No idea if they're any good, but they do exist.
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.
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.
Real-time audio is a concern of the operating system and drivers primarily.
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.
Additionally there are lookahead options in some effects that requires some delay, and clock sync for midi devices
This isn't mutual exclusive to my statement, so, please don't be so offensive and call it nonsense.
FL Studio is the most ethically licensed software I've ever used. In 2002, I paid $150 and have received lifetime updates since then. No ads, no renewal fees, no nerfing of my license to push me into a higher tier. Just the latest version every time it came out, from v3.4 to v26.
Contrast w/ Ableton, where you pay about that much every upgrade. Or something egregious like Adobe.
I'm actually rooting for FL Studio to NOT be cloned, respect to the way they ran their business, hope people pay them their money.
IS the idea that as the population increases, you'll always have a larger market share in in the future than you do now? Kind of like human inflation? If it's not that, I just don't see how they can keep the lights on month after month, year after year with single licenses.
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).
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.
I think the assets (the sounds) are the bigger barrier to entry.
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.
>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.
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.
https://on.soundcloud.com/grJ3e8EAzMc87pFzLX
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?
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!
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.
That’s what you’re buying Live for?
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?
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.
That website crashed my entire Android phone pretty badly
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?
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.
If you buy them a midi keyboard or controller it will usually come with a lite or introductory license. The push is fun but a real keyboard feels special and the pads and sliders and knobs really make Live feel like a real instrument rather than just a piece of software
That said you do get a ton of cool stuff with the higher editions
A subscription to splice or other sample/preset libraries opens up a world of possibilities as well
Having the full edition also makes it possible to use more of the example projects and templates out there, and you can follow along with the tutorials from Mr Bill too!
This is the best option by far. Lite/Intro is currently $80 on sale, but for $10-$20 more, you can get an MPK mini [1] which includes it. That version is limited to 16 tracks, but I mean... that was enough for most people up until the 90s.
[1] https://www.akaipro.com/mpk-mini-4/
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)
If they like Garage Band already, why not Logic Studio which is a “grown up” version of Garage Band?
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.
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.
Lite is the "free" version, the first real edition is called "intro".
You get lite with hardware purchase or in some magazines.
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209775685-Get-a-L...
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.
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.
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).
+1 to the other recommendations to get them Standard, Intro is pretty limited for an "upgrade" (coming from a daily user of Suite).
rutracker.net
i screamed from the hills for 15 years that they would never add ARA2. i'm thrilled to have finally been proven wrong.
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.
website crashed my iphone - took two reboots to recover
extremely badly made website
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.
Probably my favorite piece of software, ever.
Ableton Live might be great, but that's a terrible webpage.
I'm almost a little bit disappointed agentic editing didn't find it's way into Ableton yet.
I'm personally glad to see they didn't add anything AI. Suno already exists for that market, IMO.
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.
opposite feeling here.
There's a JS SDK which would probably be enough to DIY it
Is there even any such software?
Ardour (https://ardour.org/) has an MCP server.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I can easily clone this software in a week.
Go on then. If it's that easy, do it, sell it for 1/10th of the cost and make millions.
Not my creation but have a look: https://seditiondaw.com/ - in browser Ableton "clone"
Waiting on your Show HN then or larping