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.
Pretty cool! The Javascript object has really limited uses due to the low priority thread execution. Imo, they should have just exposed the C api in an object. I've tried writing my own Max external object in C, but ended up writing VST's (in JUCE) instead.
Are any of the schemes/lisps for music specifically worth checking out. I know there is CLM Common Lisp Music and it seems in general the language family would be a good fit
CLM was actually made by the author of s7, who is one of the godfathers of computer music. You could check out Common Music 3 which was a big inspiration for S4M and also runs s7, but it is unfortunately non longer actively developed as the author now has to teach using Python.
Other Lisp music related things include Incudine, Slippery Chicken, the Snd editor, MozLib (CL stuff for Max).
It is an integrated environment, but https://www.opusmodus.com is worth checking out if you are into algorithmic compositions and Lisp.
There have been several Scheme-like live coding systems that have become popular and faded away over the years. https://tidalcycles.org and its web-based friend https://strudel.cc are Haskell-like and were also getting some good attention a while go.
Once opening the door to Strudel.cc, there's no coming back. Its approach to patterns and sequencing is so ingenious, I can see a whole generation embracing it as modern way, modern notation for music, which is not played physically, but performed digitally. Further on - strudel is so easily plug-able that it easily integrates with DAWs and even a simple Mainstage + VSTs (or VCV rack) is more than enough to go totally berserk with both sound design or/and pattern sequencing.
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?
I was trying to build a version control system at one point. Basically an Ableton project is actually just a massive XML file that you could dump into a repo. I was trying to think of what a "git like" abstraction would work on top of it, but one of the challenges or problems I imagined would be all the VSTs/plugins and compatibility across units. In theory, the actual idea of freezing your XML and pushing to a git repo isn't so bad; it's similar to what Zepplin did with sketch ages ago, the fear was always - what happens when "figma" comes along and kills it but I didn't invest too much time into it.
The other challenge is media file management. Specifically, multiple MB & GB of media file storage means $$$ and git was magical because of free hosting. Then there was clip splicing and diffs - a wav file isn't exactly like a piece of code you can read directly and I don't have enough knowledge of the internals to make it work.
I was also worried Ableton would just take the idea and integrate it anyway and then it would be a wasted effort me
This is a pain point for me as well, but I'm not sure what solving this would truly look like. At the moment whenever I'm collaborating with anyone else, one of us will have the "primary" project file containing the entire mix/session, and the collaborator will be sent all stems individually, and they'll send their stems back for ingest in to the main project. It's pretty clunky, but it prevents the awkward "I don't have that plugin/VST/etc" issues that passing project files has.
I dream of a git-like workflow for Ableton, ideally with some sort of clever solve for the inevitable missing device issue (maybe freezing could solve this with some tweaks?).
I'm also curious to hear from others on how they solve this, especially when collaborating remotely.
This is very solvable in theory, we've been doing package management and version control in software for decades. I'm not familiar with the plugin/VST ecosystem enough but I'm assuming there's no real central registry ala pypi/maven/npm?
Many of the producers of the plugins are against a central repository for reasons you can guess; licensing and revenue generation. One annoying part of working with various plugins is the companies tend to have gatekeeper applications the user needs to interact with to get plugins authorized and installed on their system.
You will find applications like this one, https://www.pluginhubapp.com, show up frequently to try and manage this complexity. I am in no way at all recommending this application, but it is an example. This application does ship with all of its python code in the app under (possibly a mistake) so you can see the hoops they have to jump through to try and make their system work.
> 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.
if you're open to trying another DAW or exporting stems into one, https://audiotool.com is a full-featured browser DAW that can be used to produce professional-grade music.
It uses WebAssembly to bring performance on par with desktop DAWs, while being fully built around real-time collaboration. It even supports VST3
> mainly it uses the underlying control surface layer to receive events with a python bridge then communicates those out to a central server, from there there's a websocket room you have to be invited to and you get all the updates.
> For changes or additions of samples/tracks it sends it to an incoming temp directory and edit's the ALS to read from it instantly
> The git portion is heavily inspired by git lfs, and stores your data in r2's but only diff's between the last version and current version.
It's a hosted product, but self hosting is possible even now. I think the code is up on github.
I 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.
I mean, as an older fart, I do think there's value in committing to an idea. Though, I could also see benefit in having the processing be malleable until the last possible second. I mean, imagine if you're working with an egomaniac artist who keeps being wishy-washy on which sound they like best. If the effects are being printed and they want to go back, it could become a huge pain in the ass. AT THE SAME TIME, I think there's merit in telling someone 'no' so the project can move forward. I dunno, I guess it depends. I can see it both ways.
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.
> Any Ableton Live users here that can chime in on how they solve that?
I'm guessing you mean remote collaborations, but you don't actually mention that explicitly :D
Hot-seating works well for collaborations for me :) I've basically setup my home-studio to make it easy to "add in" more folks on a moments notice, with chairs and what not available when needed, and table space for when we do electronic jams with synths and whatever. Sometimes someone knows Ableton better than me, then I let them control everything, or vice-versa.
Folks around you (even complete strangers!) are surprisingly receptive to quick Instagram DMs with "Wanna jam at my home studio? :)" in them, and since music is what I do to get away a bit from the computer, forcing it to not ever be remote worked well for me to make it remain a more-or-less computer-less experience :)
This is the recurrent pain point I have and see my friends have with Live. An exported project always has something missing/blocking.
The procedure to ensure your project is properly fully exported should be one button in a single place, not a 4 steps checklist in different configuration views.
I 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.
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.
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.
Maybe or maybe not. I would say in general most of us here are not fans of subscription services. Those of use who have sold software and tried subscription services are very aware of the hate received by many of those paying for the subscriptions. I assure you that Ableton management is extremely aware of the general unfavorable opinion users have of subscription software. This rent-to-own model is an attempt to provide a quality product to as many users as possible and still manage to operate a going concern. Almost no one gets into the creative software space with the intention of gouging their users. There are much better outlets for people with those intentions.
Now, if Ableton ends up being acquired by a private equity firm, you may very well see a shift in their pricing model where extracting revenue from customers at the expense of product quality becomes primary.
If you have worked with any of the people currently, or formerly, running Ableton, you will know that they worked hard to regain their financial independence from their outside investors and I doubt becoming a predatory software subscription service is on their roadmap.
I love that it is not only clean and usable, but also they somehow managed to make it cool in a very minimalist and utilitarian way. It is like a digital version of a sleek physical synth with very raw industrial design. Reminds me of how NAD amplifiers look ugly-beautiful with their greyish chases.
i just like that theres a damn plugin rack at the bottom. most other DAW's i can't stand how i have to click some tiny little button to see the plugin window. its nice to be able to tweak knobs on different plugins in your chain easily
Funny! I think fl studio ui is the worst, ableton is better than fl, and bitwig much better than both. I guess it really is just personal preference or maybe we mistake familiarity for ergonomics because we build muscle memory for tools and then if we try anything else, it'll obviously feel worse because we don't know how it works.
> I guess it really is just personal preference or maybe we mistake familiarity for ergonomics
These are mutually exclusive the way I see it, and I would argue that personal preference is the right one.
I tried learning Ableton but didn't find joy in it, I think it's because FL Studio has closer origins to the music tracker days whereas Ableton avoided that.
I would say they both offer different mental modes that are orthogonal to one another
For me it was through comparison I realized this. I used some other DAWs and found Ableton to just make sense. They jam so much into a simple UI that it all just makes sense.
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.
It was last year and then I tried again some weeks ago. The issues I had were sometimes crackling audio and not being able to close a plugin's GUI window.
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.
Ah yes, I understand - yes as the other comment says, kernel supports it but most distros aren't configured that way out of the box, but it's pretty simple in most of them - on Arch you install the `realtime-privileges` package and add your user to the `realtime` group, the audio server and DAW software takes it from there.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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
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.
I sympathize with your opinion on the prices and I really appreciate how FL Studio has managed their lifetime upgrades. When you look at the monthly amortized cost of the $600 spent on Ableton, it is right in the range of monthly audio and video streaming services and way less than a monthly phone plan that a lot of us are paying for. I wouldn't say they are gouging their users, and if they are like any other small software company, they are probably on the knife edge of profitability any given quarter.
The cost of audio (or any) software has been something people have been complaining about for decades. When I started in the audio software industry, the prices (amazingly!) were just as high or higher as the prices today. Some of this cost was due to physically creating boxes, manuals, storage media and paying to get the product into sales channels. Viewed historically, you might see that you are getting a much better deal today with Ableton for $300 than Opcode Studio Vision 1.0 in 1990 for $995. In 1990, you had to call into Opcode for support and there was no online community for support and information sharing.
It is real conundrum running a company that sells creative tools; the very users you want to bring in as new customers might be the ones that are the most resistant, or unable, to paying the full price. The industry has tried to come up with various ways to assist the people, including the $79 version of Ableton that you are not a fan of.
When you are actually deriving your income from the use of the product, the pricing becomes less of an issue and I clearly remember Warner Brothers buying dozens of copies of our software to support a Danny Elfman project because he was using our software. I also remember struggling composers begging for education pricing or even free copies of the software at our booth at the NAMM trade show.
FL Studio is not unprofessional noob software by any means. Ultimately, a talented singer, songwriter, composer, DJ, etc. will use any means they have on hand to be creative.
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).
It's not an extortionate price, but the upgrades are a bit retro.
Leading with a step sequencer, automation recording, a loop mangler, and a basic drum synth in 2026 isn't pushing the creative limits of DAW design.
IMO Live is a tolerable product rather than an exciting one. Back in the days when I was making loop-based music I got more done more easily with Sonic Foundry's (then Sony's) Acid, which is still my gold standard for ease of use for that idiom.
And I still think Vegas is the best video editor I ever used.
I think with vibecoding the days of the big DAWs are numbered. A few years from now people are going to be rolling their own designs. We're going to see a lot of slopware, which won't matter because it's single-user, and some rare but incredibly inventive and inspiring completely new takes.
As a (formerly) semi-pro musician these price discussions are always so funny. $300 ($600) is so crazy cheap for the beating heart of your studio. Even more considering the price of any semi decent mic, guitar, synth or any piece of musical / studio equipment.
pirate the software if you don’t plan to use it professionally?
You can easily get some older version and play around with that for free.
In my case I bought a launchpad many years ago and for a long time used the Ableton Lite version that came with it. Was more than enough for hobby usage.
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)
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.
Love Bitwig. I don't know if Ableton ever got around to fixing it, but one of the real standouts for me with Bitwig when it first released was that it sandboxes VSTs and plug-ins, so if one goes rogue, it doesn't take down your entire DAW.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
FL Studio is the most ethically licensed software I've ever used. In 2002, I paid $150 and have received lifetime updates since then. No ads, no renewal fees, no nerfing of my license to push me into a higher tier. Just the latest version every time it came out, from v3.4 to v26.
Contrast w/ Ableton, where you pay about that much every upgrade. Or something egregious like Adobe.
I'm actually rooting for FL Studio to NOT be cloned, respect to the way they ran their business, hope people pay them their money.
IS the idea that as the population increases, you'll always have a larger market share in in the future than you do now? Kind of like human inflation? If it's not that, I just don't see how they can keep the lights on month after month, year after year with single licenses.
That's how software used to work. The flip-side is that you bought "as-is" and you couldn't expect updates. Hell you might even have to re-buy a newer major version.
Because yes it doesn't really scale. I've worked at a place with software like that and it creates a lot of bad incentives. Where I was they sold a lot of custom development for revenue beyond the upfront licensing and you can imagine the toll that wrecked on the codebase over time.
So he is right - $150 for a lifetime license of good, continuously developed software is a steal.
Totally. I was just remarking that the electric bill comes every month, but revenue only comes once and was trying to reconcile that. I suppose after a critical mass there's runway to keep the lights on and cultivate new customers, though.
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.
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.
But answering here if I understand correctly: I use (at the moment) a mostly serial chain architecture.
I think what you're asking is whether I'm using signals from one instrument (or other component) to drive another. Not as much as a first class feature similar to what you'd find in Ableton.
So, for example, I don't have today something that will drive low-pass cutoff frequency on a synth based on the kick drum sine wave decay.
Same idea you're mentioning?
On my list to get to but not there yet! I tend to add things as they come up in the process of making music, rather than approach this as a software-first-music-second project.
And in your experience, what is harder? Sound design or coding the app?
I mean there are some sounds in the public domain or things that you can synthesize yourself. But I'm talking about the basic sounds that people ahve come to expect from DAWs, like TR808 or 909. You probably don't have those, have your own versions which don't sound quite right, or versions you cannot redistribute in a DAW. If you have solid versions please tell me, because I would like to learn.
BTW I'm not saying YOUR app needs those for YOUR purposes but I'm asking to help clarify my original claim that the sound design will be the bigger bottleneck.
In a moment in time when I can code (with help of AI) - code isn't my progress blocker.
Sound design is laborious. My understanding (perhaps wrong) is the TR808/909 sounds are high-quality audio samples that the DAW maker licenses.
I'm slowly picking apart the 808/909 sounds to attempt to get close, but if I'm being honest, I don't love those sounds as the basis for everything I'm doing! My way of saying "my versions that don't sound right"
So - I spend more time on what I create from scratch!
If you can point me to somewhere that you can just buy 808/909 sounds to distribute in a DAW please let me know, but everything I've seen is basciallyjust limited to making music. As far as I know Ableton, etc. have (or work with) actual sound designers which either create samples from the actual hardware or they re-create them digitally. Which is what LLM's try to do but fail at.
To be clear, I think sounds synthesized by LLMs and public domain stuff goes a very long way. But when you want to create something very specific you're going to run into a wall. Same for 3d models, video, etc.
>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.
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 you’re determined you can always buy packs and such.
Im talking about what the biggest barrier will be to developing a DAW with LLMs. Buying the sounds doesnt let you redistribute them like that, you need commercial redistribution / software-embedding rights. The sounds people demand are going to be a bigger barrier than an agent coding it.
Your options are
1. synthesize the sounds yourself in code. LLMs aren't very good at this. Try it - you will play your sound next to a real TR808 recording and and think "this isnt even close".
2. Record a real machine yourself. Expensive and outside the domain of someone who only has coding experience. And with the 909 there may not even technically be a legal way to do it since some of the sounds are recorded and stored on the device, so you are essentially copy their recording. Many DAWs do do this but its murky.
3. License samples from a sound company. Normal sound pack licenses only cover making music with the sounds, not distributing them in a DAW. You’d need a custom OEM deal (contacting the company, negotiating, paying probably a lot, lawyer to check contract, etc).
4. License directly from Roland (not a thing as far as I know)
You need a real sound designer. But you could make a serviceable DAW with an LLM without having experience writing DAWs.
This is the same problem seen elsewhere, like video games. AI can do the code. It's the media that it can't really understand and someone without domain experience doesn't have the expertise, and doesnt even know what they don't know.
Im actually not super familiar with DAWS but perhaps some actually dont ship these sounds with and rely on plugins? In which case the user can just fetch free/licensed ones to make their music and the DAW doesnt have to ship it.
Maybe I'm undercutting my own point - I thought DAWs typically had these sorts of sounds but now that I think about it I recall hearing that sometimes people use plugins for this sort of thing.
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.
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?
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.
Eh, I find the workflow and UI of Logic clunky. I prefer Ableton, also there are more resources online and it's better for live performance. Second best for me would be Fruityloops.
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.
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.
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).
It's been a while since I've been in the DAW space. I remember some controversy around the way Ableton implemented Plugin Delay Compensation. Every DAW has to handle this in their own way, and not everyone does it well, but I remember it being especially problematic for Ableton, where people were trashing it from afar just for this singular issue.
Is this still a thing? Does anyone remember if this was overblown or if it was a fair criticism? I believe FL Studio handled this way worse for a long time, but eventually fixed it.
I had the same thought for this "What's new in Live 13", but to be fair they do seem to use minor versions to bring in new stuff. Version 12 got up to 12.4, and each of those minors got a significant amount of new things:
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.
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.
Either way, going to give this a go!
Other Lisp music related things include Incudine, Slippery Chicken, the Snd editor, MozLib (CL stuff for Max).
There have been several Scheme-like live coding systems that have become popular and faded away over the years. https://tidalcycles.org and its web-based friend https://strudel.cc are Haskell-like and were also getting some good attention a while go.
Any Ableton Live users here that can chime in on how they solve that?
The other challenge is media file management. Specifically, multiple MB & GB of media file storage means $$$ and git was magical because of free hosting. Then there was clip splicing and diffs - a wav file isn't exactly like a piece of code you can read directly and I don't have enough knowledge of the internals to make it work.
I was also worried Ableton would just take the idea and integrate it anyway and then it would be a wasted effort me
I dream of a git-like workflow for Ableton, ideally with some sort of clever solve for the inevitable missing device issue (maybe freezing could solve this with some tweaks?).
I'm also curious to hear from others on how they solve this, especially when collaborating remotely.
You will find applications like this one, https://www.pluginhubapp.com, show up frequently to try and manage this complexity. I am in no way at all recommending this application, but it is an example. This application does ship with all of its python code in the app under (possibly a mistake) so you can see the hoops they have to jump through to try and make their system work.
that's exactly right, unfortunately. it's a bit of the wild-west the it comes to plugins/VSTs in terms of distribution.
and I agree, this feels like the sort of thing that should be pretty solvable, but I think there's a lot of hidden complexity in this problem space. Solving the "version control" aspect of this feels like it should be rather straightforward for a single user, involving multiple users with different Ableton Live versions, different plugins/VSTs (and different versions within those) is where things would undoubtedly get messy.
I do think there is a niche market for this sort of thing, however.
It uses WebAssembly to bring performance on par with desktop DAWs, while being fully built around real-time collaboration. It even supports VST3
many great community features there too
https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/1xrbj82/been_an_ab...
> mainly it uses the underlying control surface layer to receive events with a python bridge then communicates those out to a central server, from there there's a websocket room you have to be invited to and you get all the updates.
> For changes or additions of samples/tracks it sends it to an incoming temp directory and edit's the ALS to read from it instantly
> The git portion is heavily inspired by git lfs, and stores your data in r2's but only diff's between the last version and current version.
It's a hosted product, but self hosting is possible even now. I think the code is up on github.
Asynchronous collaboration, there are a few non-native solutions.
Or you can always exchange files via Dropbox or something as you said. Or share screen.
Live playing over the public internet, there's no good way to do it , and can't really be due to latency. Many projects tried, all suck.
Live playing locally, there's Ableton Link.
This is a huge update (ARA alone, the step sequencer, etc) anyway, and many long awaited and several non expected items.
https://audiomovers.com/products/listento
> Officially, it was known as "Ableton Link Share" during early development and then launched as “Ableton Live’s ‘Share’ feature” — introduced around Live 9.1 (2013–2015 era).
> It allowed users to upload their Live Sets directly from Ableton Live to a personal web page (via ableton.com) to share projects with others — including audio previews and downloadable Live Sets.
> Ableton eventually discontinued the Share feature in 2017, citing limited use and the shift in focus toward Ableton Cloud / Splice / Link integration as alternative collaboration tools.
[0]: https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=252909
That said, I think that vanilla Ableton provides a whole lot to collaborate with. Maybe there are a lot of people for whom the base set works, but "do you have Apollo UAD + the Neve preamp plugin?" or something like it is not a rare occurrence.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50441616
I'm guessing you mean remote collaborations, but you don't actually mention that explicitly :D
Hot-seating works well for collaborations for me :) I've basically setup my home-studio to make it easy to "add in" more folks on a moments notice, with chairs and what not available when needed, and table space for when we do electronic jams with synths and whatever. Sometimes someone knows Ableton better than me, then I let them control everything, or vice-versa.
Folks around you (even complete strangers!) are surprisingly receptive to quick Instagram DMs with "Wanna jam at my home studio? :)" in them, and since music is what I do to get away a bit from the computer, forcing it to not ever be remote worked well for me to make it remain a more-or-less computer-less experience :)
The procedure to ensure your project is properly fully exported should be one button in a single place, not a 4 steps checklist in different configuration views.
Other commenters have stated what a pain it is to just get two environments in sync. A complex production will have tons of plugins, various MIDI and audio interfaces, differing outboard gear and other variables that make life hard when sharing files.
You also have asset management issues; where are the audio stems, vocal tracks, library resources, etc. stored and how are they shared.
If you want to collaborate in real-time, then there is another layer of technical challenges.
I have been working on a system that is influenced from my earlier experience building audio tools for earlier generations of sequencers and DAWs, rendering pipelines for Dreamworks and configuration management systems for Amazon. I feel you really need a system that uses a DSL and all operations are defined at that level. There shouldn't be anything you can do in the user interface that isn't available at the DSL level. You can then think about techniques used in Docker, k8s, etc. to define and deploy both the environment and the interpretation of the DSL in the user interface.
Wasn’t that the one written in assembler? Kudos!
Amazingly, the website is still alive: https://www.sawstudio.com/products_sawstudio.htm I am not brave enough to download and try it out.
(I want to point out that I was not the author of SAW, Bob Lentini was. I worked on integrating SAW with MasterTracks Pro from Passport Designs.)
In terms of workflow I can imagine a "shared project" view in Live that loads the shared bare bones project file and allows you to easily lay your own tracks on top (with whatever VSTs you have installed locally), and then allows you to freeze and share those recordings as audio in one go, in the shared project.
IMO that's a better model for consumers since you do get something at the end of it. And if you are a professional, you were probably already getting the latest and greatest every time anyways.
[1] https://www.ableton.com/en/rent-to-own-ableton-live/
The model just works because you don’t need to upgrade constantly, it’s nothing like a subscription.
Now, if Ableton ends up being acquired by a private equity firm, you may very well see a shift in their pricing model where extracting revenue from customers at the expense of product quality becomes primary.
If you have worked with any of the people currently, or formerly, running Ableton, you will know that they worked hard to regain their financial independence from their outside investors and I doubt becoming a predatory software subscription service is on their roadmap.
There is very little reason to upgrade to the latest versions IMO
Yeah, I know... personal taste :)
These are mutually exclusive the way I see it, and I would argue that personal preference is the right one.
I tried learning Ableton but didn't find joy in it, I think it's because FL Studio has closer origins to the music tracker days whereas Ableton avoided that.
I would say they both offer different mental modes that are orthogonal to one another
It is cheaper, supports Linux and I start to think it is also the better DAW.
It's on flathub so you can try it on any distro and see if you like it.
Bitwig has so many tiny conveniences like this that I never bothered to renew my Live license. Native Linux support is the cherry on top.
There are even projects like this that let you restore the missing parts and use it elsewhere, but it's kinda buggy: https://github.com/velkajelka/linux-native-ableton
For open source, Ardour but yeah...
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.
If you mean device drivers, it can be a bit hit or miss, generally stuff works but for example I have an SSL audio interface and while the audio works, it's missing a lot of the configuration options that the Windows drivers give you around customisable audio routing.
Maybe timing is the wrong word. Latency is definitely a related concern.
If something needs to fire every 1209 ms then it can't get fired in 1232 ms this time and then 1198 ms next time. Maybe a better term would be clock jitter or drift?
As I understand it, a DAW needs something close to a RTOS.
You might need to tweak kernel settings for better latency https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio#Optimizi...
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.
Also the Device slots overview in session view could be useful. I'm kind of excited guys, ngl
https://learningmusic.ableton.com/ https://learningsynths.ableton.com/
My advice, if you have the budget, get Standard and upgrade to Suite later (at a discount). Suite is _nice_ but it's really mostly bells and whistles that you don't "need" to get from Ableton. Suite has a ton of included sound packs and instruments that are certainly useful but may not be useful to you.
As for the Akai MPK Mini, that's going to be entirely subjective IMO. I've bought several midi controllers over the years, and I've settled on a few key pieces that I'm happy with. The Arturia KeyStep 37 is the perfect keyboard for my desktop. It has enough range in a compact form factor and doesn't have any features I don't need (I'm not affiliated with Arturia).
If you don't already have a midi keyboard, I would suggest grabbing an affordable one!
Keep an eye out for their black friday deal(s), usually they have a really good package deal on BF (when I got it too).
Then Seed to Stage on YouTube has amazing videos on a bunch of topics, all very much focused on Ableton Live.
The hardest part when I was starting was finding genre-specific advice on music production. It really took digging to get the nuggets of what felt like a trade secret. Now, though, there is a massive flood of video tutorials for just about any niche of music.
For music theory, flip through The Jazz Language by Dan Hearle. You may not need everything in there, but it will get you up to speed on contemporary music vocabulary.
The biggest difference with intro is that you are limited to 16 tracks, and some of the software plugins aren't present. If you are new to music production then this should hardly matter to you. You will be able to get a good sense of whether you enjoy working with Ableton or not, and you can always upgrade later.
Good luck with the music!
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
The cost of audio (or any) software has been something people have been complaining about for decades. When I started in the audio software industry, the prices (amazingly!) were just as high or higher as the prices today. Some of this cost was due to physically creating boxes, manuals, storage media and paying to get the product into sales channels. Viewed historically, you might see that you are getting a much better deal today with Ableton for $300 than Opcode Studio Vision 1.0 in 1990 for $995. In 1990, you had to call into Opcode for support and there was no online community for support and information sharing.
It is real conundrum running a company that sells creative tools; the very users you want to bring in as new customers might be the ones that are the most resistant, or unable, to paying the full price. The industry has tried to come up with various ways to assist the people, including the $79 version of Ableton that you are not a fan of.
When you are actually deriving your income from the use of the product, the pricing becomes less of an issue and I clearly remember Warner Brothers buying dozens of copies of our software to support a Danny Elfman project because he was using our software. I also remember struggling composers begging for education pricing or even free copies of the software at our booth at the NAMM trade show.
FL Studio is not unprofessional noob software by any means. Ultimately, a talented singer, songwriter, composer, DJ, etc. will use any means they have on hand to be creative.
You don’t need to get the new major versions.
It’s also really easy to crack Ableton and use it for free if you just want to test it out - i think it’s part of their sales strategy tbh
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.
looking back at my order history, I upgraded from Live 10 Suite (purchased 2018) to Live 11 Suite for $245.60 in 2021 and again from 11 Suite to 12 Suite in 2024 for $245.60.
Everyone has a different financial situation, but for me this is entirely fair pricing for professional grade software that does not have a subscription that I use on an almost daily basis. I am happy to continue supporting Ableton, they respect me as a user and are consistent in their quality and output. (I don't use FL Studio, this is not a dig at that company/platform, just a happy Ableton user).
Leading with a step sequencer, automation recording, a loop mangler, and a basic drum synth in 2026 isn't pushing the creative limits of DAW design.
IMO Live is a tolerable product rather than an exciting one. Back in the days when I was making loop-based music I got more done more easily with Sonic Foundry's (then Sony's) Acid, which is still my gold standard for ease of use for that idiom.
And I still think Vegas is the best video editor I ever used.
I think with vibecoding the days of the big DAWs are numbered. A few years from now people are going to be rolling their own designs. We're going to see a lot of slopware, which won't matter because it's single-user, and some rare but incredibly inventive and inspiring completely new takes.
I've been making beats for about 20 years. For me music is essentially a diary that others occasionally read.
I'll never make a nickel off this.
Also if I buy a 2000$ microphone I own it forever and I can even sell it and maybe recoup half.
Vs paying 200$ a year forever.
Plus FL Studio is about 300$ once for the All Plugins edition.
You can easily get some older version and play around with that for free.
In my case I bought a launchpad many years ago and for a long time used the Ableton Lite version that came with it. Was more than enough for hobby usage.
I’m working on two ARA-2 plugins so this is a small bit of good news.
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 have heard people claim that ArtCraft are not using LLMs to generate their apps, but the presentation and code almost seem like someone gave their LLM agent the Reaper manual and asked it to produce a clone.
Their main tagline on the site is also strange "Professional audio recording and mixing, rebuilt in pure Rust." Really, who cares? No one I know in the performance, composition and recording industry cares at all. What they care about is reliability, stability, workflows and support. Yes, and price. But none of the flagship DAWs have onerous pricing and as others have pointed out, FL Studio has been a good investment over the years. If price is a concern, it is hard to beat Reaper in terms of value and functionality.
I am sure people will continue to one-shot or iterate clones of the leading DAWs and some people will try to use them and probably end up wasting their time on their productions when whoever is behind the project moves on. It is extremely hard work supporting any application and the users of MIDI, audio and notation software are extremely demanding.
My career started way back working on apps for companies like Passport, Opcode and some other music startups, and it I had the sufficient time, the last thing I would want to do is just clone Ableton. My hope is that some effort will come along to total re-invent what and how a music creation and production app should be. I often times feel we hit "Peak DAW" over 20 years ago.
If you just do "computer music", with no synced live instruments and external synths, it's a much easier problem, 40 ms of latency is perfectly fine, and on modern hardware it's not hard to hit that target.
Contrast w/ Ableton, where you pay about that much every upgrade. Or something egregious like Adobe.
I'm actually rooting for FL Studio to NOT be cloned, respect to the way they ran their business, hope people pay them their money.
Because yes it doesn't really scale. I've worked at a place with software like that and it creates a lot of bad incentives. Where I was they sold a lot of custom development for revenue beyond the upfront licensing and you can imagine the toll that wrecked on the codebase over time.
So he is right - $150 for a lifetime license of good, continuously developed software is a steal.
Not everything has to be a billion-dollar swing.
Not everything should!
I mean, vibecoded apps can be fine if you are editing just an image, or a small video you are editing for nothing serious, as a beginner, etc.. but for people that is serious about making videos or making songs that take a lot of effort and time, paying 159 euros to upgrade every 3 to 4 years is a no-brainer (I already pre-ordered it).
And I agree that the assets are a big barrier. If you look at Logic Pro X (my tool): it needs some 80GB for the full install without getting anything else. And without other software, you can expand it with extra loops and sample packs. I guess the interface to those can be reverse-engineered, but even that's a barrier.
On the other hand, refining/tweaking over time may get you closer. I'm quite far down this road, having created a DAW of my own flavor.
It's absolutely not perfect, nor is it a production-level app or even clone, but I trust it for electronic music production because it, like many other programs, does the basics well.
That's another point worth making about the assets. They're a barrier as someone builds them over time. You might have 2000 (example) custom presets and audio file alterations in Ableton and use them as your "sound" as a producer.
Thinking names like Kaskade, Deadmau5, etc. Plenty of others.
Going back to the code, reverb is the example that illuminates the difficulty of cloning in my day-to-day. Sometimes quite explicit in songs, and sometimes hiding just enough in the background. But IMO - stands out immediately when it sounds "off" as I lack a better description.
Anyhow, here's my song from my DAW in case you're curious! Note that it's not mastered so you'll need to crank your volume somewhat.
https://on.soundcloud.com/grJ3e8EAzMc87pFzLX
Thanks for sharing the song. This is material proof that your program can generate a composition. Did you come up with some new ideas about how to create and produce?
Blending lots of ideas from other places (unsurprising I'm sure). I first used FL Studio, and am more recently an owner of Ableton. Some things I like and dislike about both, so what I tried to do with my app is blend what I like.
E.g. FL Studio = step sequencer. Ableton = more intuitive (I think) for whole song composition. Of course, now Live 13 has a Step Sequencer...
The other areas I'm exploring is sound design. One goal in this effort is to remove dependencies on other tools as much as possible. So every sound you heard in my song is from the app alone - not some external sample or other synth/VST tool.
So, then suppose you sit down with a blank slate and draw a wave. Preview it. Now add bits and pieces on top. But more of a visual design canvas rather than the Reason-style rack wiring.
PS: Thank you for checking out the song!
But answering here if I understand correctly: I use (at the moment) a mostly serial chain architecture.
I think what you're asking is whether I'm using signals from one instrument (or other component) to drive another. Not as much as a first class feature similar to what you'd find in Ableton.
So, for example, I don't have today something that will drive low-pass cutoff frequency on a synth based on the kick drum sine wave decay.
Same idea you're mentioning?
On my list to get to but not there yet! I tend to add things as they come up in the process of making music, rather than approach this as a software-first-music-second project.
I mean there are some sounds in the public domain or things that you can synthesize yourself. But I'm talking about the basic sounds that people ahve come to expect from DAWs, like TR808 or 909. You probably don't have those, have your own versions which don't sound quite right, or versions you cannot redistribute in a DAW. If you have solid versions please tell me, because I would like to learn.
BTW I'm not saying YOUR app needs those for YOUR purposes but I'm asking to help clarify my original claim that the sound design will be the bigger bottleneck.
Sound design is laborious. My understanding (perhaps wrong) is the TR808/909 sounds are high-quality audio samples that the DAW maker licenses.
I'm slowly picking apart the 808/909 sounds to attempt to get close, but if I'm being honest, I don't love those sounds as the basis for everything I'm doing! My way of saying "my versions that don't sound right"
So - I spend more time on what I create from scratch!
To be clear, I think sounds synthesized by LLMs and public domain stuff goes a very long way. But when you want to create something very specific you're going to run into a wall. Same for 3d models, video, etc.
Oh I'm sure - but that's not the weakness of an LLM. An LLM can handle all sorts of complicated signal processing.
It cannot reproduce the sound of a 808. And if you give it a benchmark and a candidate it cannot hear the difference in a meaningful way nor determine if it sounds "good." It cannot do it. Only a person with extensive domain experience can.
Adobe not withstanding none of these programs are ever that expensive either. I understand everyone has a different budget but if you can’t scrape together $100-$300 to buy essential software for something you want to do, then you probably have bigger issues on your plate. Hell, reaper is what? $40?
Im talking about what the biggest barrier will be to developing a DAW with LLMs. Buying the sounds doesnt let you redistribute them like that, you need commercial redistribution / software-embedding rights. The sounds people demand are going to be a bigger barrier than an agent coding it.
Your options are
1. synthesize the sounds yourself in code. LLMs aren't very good at this. Try it - you will play your sound next to a real TR808 recording and and think "this isnt even close".
2. Record a real machine yourself. Expensive and outside the domain of someone who only has coding experience. And with the 909 there may not even technically be a legal way to do it since some of the sounds are recorded and stored on the device, so you are essentially copy their recording. Many DAWs do do this but its murky.
3. License samples from a sound company. Normal sound pack licenses only cover making music with the sounds, not distributing them in a DAW. You’d need a custom OEM deal (contacting the company, negotiating, paying probably a lot, lawyer to check contract, etc).
4. License directly from Roland (not a thing as far as I know)
You need a real sound designer. But you could make a serviceable DAW with an LLM without having experience writing DAWs.
This is the same problem seen elsewhere, like video games. AI can do the code. It's the media that it can't really understand and someone without domain experience doesn't have the expertise, and doesnt even know what they don't know.
Maybe I'm undercutting my own point - I thought DAWs typically had these sorts of sounds but now that I think about it I recall hearing that sometimes people use plugins for this sort of thing.
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.
That said you do get a ton of cool stuff with the higher editions
A subscription to splice or other sample/preset libraries opens up a world of possibilities as well
Having the full edition also makes it possible to use more of the example projects and templates out there, and you can follow along with the tutorials from Mr Bill too!
[1] https://www.akaipro.com/mpk-mini-4/
DAWs and MIDI controllers are sort of like keyboards, notebooks, or text editors. They all do the same things, but when they're your primary work surface little idiosyncrasies add up to flow-wrecking annoyances.
Lots of people love Logic, but I'm not one of them. It's not anything wrong with the product, it's just that Live clicks with my brain in a way that Logic doesn't. The Live interface has things arranged where I expect them to be. Logic hides everything in drawers.
That said, your teenager might be using Garage Band because they really like it, or they might use it because it's free and what they have. On the controller side, if they have experience with piano, they probably want a keyboard. If they don't, they might or might not want piano keys. If they do play piano, they will have preferences about key feel and size. My old piano muscle memory can't handle mini keyboards, for example.
You get lite with hardware purchase or in some magazines.
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209775685-Get-a-L...
Ableton suite is amazing because of all the content you get with it (instruments, effects, samples), but lite comes with enough to get you going and you can always add vsts and samples from 3rd parties.
It has a hard limit of 8 tracks, Intro doubles that to 16, while Standard is the first version without limitations. Intro should be more than fine for most beginners.
Is this still a thing? Does anyone remember if this was overblown or if it was a fair criticism? I believe FL Studio handled this way worse for a long time, but eventually fixed it.
I'm not a fan boy of any companies or tools, but Live has continued to impress me with each release.
This is stuff that honestly should have been in a free update
Bitwig is a bit better but I'm desperate for an actually good OSS DAW (Reaper is neither FOSS nor good IMO) even I have to make it myself eventually
https://www.ableton.com/en/release-notes/live-12/
Not sure if this is the best way to market these things
We seek to complement the user by giving them access to a mix and master engineer, not replacing them like with Suno. We've got a booth at MONO sf this weekend at the Midway in SF, come find us! if you're on the fence, email me for a promo code to the conference!
The problem I have with the AI mastering is it seems to be a bit clumsy with making the master fit the song. A lot of these tools just have simple buttons like "low, medium high", and seem to default to really squashing the dynamics to achieve maximum loudness. I have worked with both human mastering engineers and AI mastering, and I would say a decent human mastering engineer is noticeably better at feeling out the songs and finding the right balance.
To your question though, it's a chatbot so tell it you want your track to sound like eg Polo and Pan, it'll look for ways to enhance it in their style rather than a simple small/medium/large knob. It'll load one of the built-in mastering chains and tweak the settings on those, or if you have a preference, you can tell it that too.