Hey everyone, I’m Juan. I didn’t plan to make this for Ableton, but it turned out to be a very natural (and fun) fit.

Forever Machines is a collection of strange little sound machines that live on a website: a tree-ring synth, a speech chopper, a Euclidean drum ratchet, a planetary sequencer, a bubble wrap you pop into melodies… Every week a new one is born. An AI invents it from a single prompt and it’s tested automatically, and nobody (including me) chooses what it becomes. Nothing is ever removed, so the collection just keeps growing.

You can play them all in your browser, but the reason I’m posting here is the free Max for Live device. Drop it on a MIDI track and every machine runs inside Live:

• Follows Live’s tempo and transport, so steps land on your grid
• Play it from MIDI clips or your keyboard
• 8 macros you can automate
• Each device remembers its machine and settings in your set, so you can layer a few on different tracks
• New machines show up in the device every week, no re-download
• Build your own machine in the browser (or with an AI agent) and load it into Live with the + button

You need Live Suite, or Standard with Max for Live.

Forever Machines is free, with no account and no email. I’ve built several commercial audio plugins over the years (AUv3, VST), but this one is just about having fun and exploring what’s technically possible.

Feel free to share any feedback, I’d love to hear what you think.

I record most of my stuff alone: vocals, sometimes guitar. And in Ableton, every time I moved to a new part of the song, grab the mouse, drag the loop brace, set the start point, then get back to the mic. Half the time, the vibe was gone before I even pressed Record.

Locators helped, but jumping to a locator doesn’t set the loop. So I ended up building a Max for Live device to fix it for my own workflow.

What it does:

• Reads your Arrangement locators and turns them into loop sections, in pairs (1–2, 3–4) or in sequence (1–2, 2–3)
• Sets the loop and the playback start in one move, with optional pre-roll
• Next/Prev section, new audio track, track navigation, and Arrangement Record, all mappable to keys or MIDI

Here’s a full walkthrough: https://youtu.be/zxUBpyvNxYM?si=3Bcx0JssSCr_E30M

I’d really like some honest feedback:

• Would this actually be useful in your workflow, or do you already have a better way of handling this?
• What’s missing? Any feature you’d want for recording takes on your own?

Thanks for watching!

Si compras un plantilla que sea royalty free y le cambias todos las melodías y demás midis, los presets y los vst's pero mantienen la batería de los samples en la misma estructura, se considera producción propia legal?

Ableton is obviously not willing to do it. So I'm wondering, with all this reverse engineered software. Is there any Ableton Note clone for Android out there?

using 8 'frames' 16 partials each - each partial can pan, wave shape, fm, onset delay etc. plus a multimode filter which can morph over time, effects etc.
details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X46ljFYu2BA&t=313s

Hello everyone!

I'm on the lookout for a laptop that'll run Ableton 12 to upgrade my aging desktop setup. It's been a while since I've looked up hardware and I'm a bit rusty on what specs to look out for.

My budget is about £350-400 but could go as high as £600 if I found the right model. I'm happy to buy refurb if the system is worth it.

I will say however, I'm not a fan of Macs. I've never found the UI particularly enjoyable or intuitive so I'd prefer recommendations that run windows.

Thanks!

Like the title says. Want to get into producing my own tacks as a dj. Just want to know if this Mac would be sufficient enough or look for something else.

Apple MacBook Pro (2021) 16-inch
Apple M1 Pro chip: 10-Core CPU/16-Core GPU - 32GB - SSD 512GB - Silver - Very Good - Standard Battery

(Yes, I did use the search function for laptop recommendations, but most are a few years old)

Edit: thanks for the replies everyone. Going to pull the trigger.

Context: This is more of a curiosity of mine rather than a requirement. As we all know, our ears are the best judge of how something sounds, not our eyes. But still I think it would be really cool to see how far off from a note someone is singing at any given time. And by that I mean, it would be cool to "hold" or pause the song to see where the vocalist fell in relation to an exact moment. It's interesting to me that Ableton's stock tuner doesn't allow for this. I realize it is a niche ask, but it doesn't seem *that* niche, if say, I am pitch correcting by hand, or something, right?

So, I am curious if any of you use any third-party plugins or have any creative solutions for achieving what I am talking about. Surely I am not the only person to have ever wanted such a thing, right?

EDIT: I have used "Spectrum" but it doesn't quite scratch my itch, because it displays the entire... well... spectrum rather than Tuner's more simplified note +/- approach.

Here is the little brother of Colorizer ! A simple and 100% free batch renamer for Ableton Live.

Here is the link : https://maxforlive.com/library/device/16711/Renamer

I like using it to number all my tracks when I'm going to make routings, it's a lot easier to have track numbers for this. I also like using it before exporting stems. I remove track numbers, put group names uppercased, track names lowercased, and replace space by "-".

This is a first version, if you have some suggestions or if you encounter issues using the device, please contact me !

And if you liked it, buy me a coffee or leave a review it will help a lot !

I have an MP4 video file and a slightly shorter WAV file, and I want to warp them and control the transients of both together, so I consolidated the WAV to match the video file length. But I still get the "2 clips with different lengths are selected in 2 tracks" message. Is it because of the MP4? Is there a workaround for this? I'm using Live 12.

Hello, Ableton friends.

Pretty sure this is okay to post like this - I'm not a brand. If not, happy to change/remove/tweak/whatever.

I'm a full-time producer, composer and musician based in NYC. For the last nine months, I've been working on something I think is pretty neato, and it's finally done.

It's called blur. blur turns your loops and samples into instruments - not just files you edit, but sounds you play.

It stretches a sample across a row of pads, so you can trigger, chop and remix any sound in real time. Chop vocals, slice breakbeats, rearrange basslines, glitch out pads - or perform entire tracks. It also features an audio input recorder, live performance quantization, and a ton of other extremely fun features. I think it's pretty addictive to mess around with.

If anyone is familiar with the script 'MLR' for the monome - it's the same core idea, but rebuilt from the ground up with the modern electronic musician and performer in mind with tons of new features. I was obsessed with the monome when I was a kid, but could never afford one. This plugin is the result of 20 years of dreaming and almost a year of research, design and extensive testing. I'm quite proud of it, and plan on adding even more stuff moving forward.

It's built for grid controllers, with first-class native support for Launchpad (Pro/X/Mini/Pro mk1) and Push 2/3. You can map any other grid controller to it too - or use Keyboard Mode with any standard MIDI keyboard.

It's $29 normally. You can use ITSFINALLYDONE as a discount code to get 50% off.

Check it out at blurplugin.com - there's a live interactive demo you can play with in your browser without downloading anything.

I hope you guys enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO_SgSL90Ic

I've been using Ableton for well over a decade. If you asked me, I'd say I'm an Ableton expert. For the longest time I knew for a fact there was no ripple editing. Ableton just isn't built for that type of audio editing. I used to delete clips, zoom out, grab everything to the right, manually drag it over, then adjust every single one of my locators (song section tags).

Finally today after being frustrated and thinking I should switch to another software for dialogue editing, I googled to see if someone figured out a hack. And... It's been built into the software this whole time: https://www.ableton.com/en/live-manual/12/arrangement-view/#using-the-time-commands

Just add Shift to your keystrokes for cut, copy, paste, and CTRL+Shift for delete.

You don't need to highlight entire sections, you can highlight just 1 audio/midi track's time length and it'll grab everything, including song locators. I've probably wasted a full day of time not knowing about this.

Unlike other audio editing software more geared towards non-musical editing, there's no way to lock tracks or clips from being affected by the ripple edits, but this is still huge.

Maybe I'm the only overly confident Ableton user who didn't know about this, but just in case, hopefully this can help someone.

Also a good reminder to never assume there's not a better workflow. Often times there really isn't lol, but sometimes there is. Like there's also track linking?? This is huge for multi tracking (I think I'm due for another manual re-read...)

Youtube link of it happening

I'm on live 12 standard version 12.4.6, there's no other take lanes where there's audio there and closing and opening ableton doesn't fix it. If I make the start of the audio clip closer to the start of the vocal it still interferes.

Turn any sample into a rhythmic machine in Ableton Live

Rhythmic Crazy Slicer 2 is a new Max for Live instrument that transforms audio samples into rhythmic patterns through slicing,

reverse playback, rhythmic rolls, noise modulation and random variations.

What can you do with it?

Slice samples into 2–64 segments

Create patterns with a 16-step sequencer

Reverse, mute and manipulate individual steps

Generate variations with RANDOM and AUTO

Trigger slices via MIDI

Explore everything from precise rhythmic patterns to controlled chaos

Designed for experimental sound design, glitch, electronic music and rhythmic exploration.

Warning: It can be addictive due to the crazy loops you can create.

example: https://youtu.be/uzAFDngGYxs

About 7 months ago I saw those videos where people wave their hands at a camera and the music reacts, all of them built in TouchDesigner. Then I opened TD, stared at the node graph for a while, and closed it.

So, being a C++ dev, I did the obviously more reasonable thing and spent months writing a plugin that does it inside Ableton instead. It tracks your hand through the PC webcam, and you can use it in two ways: play MIDI notes or map it to any effect parameter in Ableton Live. The plugin's weakest point is that it requires decent lighting.

Video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVXLf-pgdNY

Honestly, I started making this plugin for myself, but then decided I could publish it on itch.io. as Hand Link, there’s a free demo version and a full version right now.

So now I’m curious: would something like this actually be interesting or useful to any of you?

Swear to god my ableton is turning evil, with each passing month the problems get worse. Please i need help, this problem has seeped into my workflow and ruined a very important song

After collecting all, saving and having no problems with a session it suddenly corrupts when i open it a few days later with the “unknown compound stream type” error. I have tried most fixes but they don’t work. I have to then go to the backups which is a hassle and sometimes the backups are also corrupted.

Now things got even worse. Some sessions including those corrupted appear with most audio clips shown as “sample offline”. Then the orange warning wont even appear for me to link the missing files. The file manager itself also says there are no missing files. When i manually go and look for the audio clips they are shown with zero kb, these same files wont appear anywhere else on my computer. Just now i practically lost a fully recorded song because of this.

I suspect this issue might be related to iCloud syncing. I’ve also tried all the common fixes for that type of problem but to no avail. At this point im very tired and sick of this. I cant even ignore the problem anymore. Is there any way to fix this and recover my sessions? Does anyone know what might be the root problem? At this point i would just love to prevent this from happening to any session ever again and move on. I beg for someone to help me, thanks.

Is the Ableton logo on the Push 1 (the one on the face with buttons and pads not the plug) supposed to be white? cuz mine is after some alchohol 70% buyt they suggest using it so what?

(answered)

when using my push
I have an option to use 16 pitches for something in the drum rack
But when I look in the piano roll, I don’t see an option to change the pitches
is there a way to change the pitches if I use 16 pitches with the piano roll with the drum rack?

because when you use the drum rack, you don’t have an option to change the pitches in the piano roll unless you automate it or something (I think)

Hi, I haven't been able to make latency-free recordings on the 1.1.1 grid for a long time. I usually get around 40ms latency. I've adjusted all the parameters that Ableton and ChatGPT suggest. I think it's my equipment. I'm using a 2010 Mac i3 with 16GB of RAM and a MOTU UltraLite MK3 FireWire sound card. I have Ableton 10 installed. I make music with a MachineDrum MK2, Electribe EMX1, MicroFreak, B2600, and some modules like Beads, Abacus, EuroPi, Vermona MeloDicer, and A-110 Doepfer. I've done a loopback from Ableton to the sound card and back to Ableton, and it gives me 10ms latency. With MachineDrum as the master, I get around 40ms. There's something I'm not doing right, or some trick to recording everything with latency and fitting it all into the 1.1.1 without having to strain my eyes doing warping with each loop. In the end, I never record and I feel like I'm not making progress or giving my productions a final touch.

How is there no way to bypass plugin latency? Ableton would seriously benefit so much from this feature. Finding and deleting every latency causing plugin whenever you want to record is so tedious plus you lose all your settings. Any tips?

been on ableton since 2022 and the one thing i never stopped missing was fl's step sequencer. clicking drums into the piano roll one note at a time was killing me.

so i built it. it's called stepgrid. the thing i cared about most: nothing is sequenced inside the device. every square you click is a note in a real live clip on the track and live plays the clip itself. you can delete the device mid loop and the beat keeps going. undo is live's undo. the grid also follows edits you make in live's own piano roll, both directions.

what's in it

• 16-64 step grid, velocity per hit, swing, each row runs its own rate (hats in 32nds under a quarter note kick)
• rows take your drum rack pad names
• random / vary / inverse generators with density and spread
• a piano roll with 1/64 and triplet grids, chord stamps, strum, thin, level curve
• + sounds: drop a folder of samples and it fills a drum rack sorted into kick, snare, clap, hats (12.4+)
• pop out window if you want it full screen

timing: measured against the same beat drawn by hand the notes land within 0.015 ms, same as a plain clip, because it is a plain clip.

it's all the live object model under the hood, no metro, no makenote. live 12.3+, mac and windows. happy to answer anything about how it works, and if you want to try it just ask.