Ableton Live 13 brings a built-in step sequencer and ARA 2 support
Ableton's next major release adds a native Step Sequencer for beats, melodies, and polyrhythms, ARA 2 support for plug-ins like Melodyne, Capture Automation, and contextual browsing from the device chain. Racks expand to 32 Macros with custom mapping curves, joined by new Multiband and Mid-Side Racks, Envelope Clips, and mixer Device Slots. Suite bundles Melodyne essential, Looplet, Clipper, Transient Shaper, and Softube's Classic Dynamics & EQ Pack. Live 13 ships in early 2027.
Everything you can do in Live 12 you can still do in Live 13.
- iainctduncan
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.
- marceldegraaf
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?
- cruano
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.
- iamsaitam
Shameless plug, but one of the toughest parts of working with Ableton Live is managing all your projects and keeping track of what's what.. unless you use REKALL[1]. An application I worked on (actually me, not claude, but claude did review a few bits) in order to help me manage my 400+ live sets.
- sma3in
I have dual boot setup and Ableton is the only software keeping me running Windows. I tried out Bitwig, seems great but I got too comfortable with Ableton that it's really hard to switch. I really hope we get a Linux version in the future.
- stcg
After switching from Windows to Linux years ago the only application I ever missed is Ableton.
I remember loving its basic effects: the (pingpong) delay, the reverb, the Eq, the compressor. And how easy it was to consolidate a track ander build further on top of it, cut it up, make a new instrument using it.
Great software
I tried running it with Wine but the experience wasn't great. And if it even worked, the VST's would be a whole new problem. So I dropped the hobby of digital musical production in favour of other hobbies
- NSUserDefaults
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.
- semtud
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?
- alfyboy
Wish they would add Linux support. What is the best option for Linux?
- EastLondonCoder
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 tra […]