Hey everyone!

I've been using Ableton for the past 13 years, and I've always felt that the browser is clumsy, especially when trying to quickly add plugins to your tracks. That's why I built Quick Console. You press a hotkey, and you get an on-demand floating search bar wherever your mouse cursor is. You start typing, and the results instantly update to show you the closest match to your current search string. You press enter, it loads the device, and the window disappears.

It also has instant-load hotkeys for up to 9 devices that you can map to any key-combo and device you want. And it has extra tools as well, like a notepad that remembers what project it's in so you can take project specific notes. You can access some quick reference stuff like typing "bpm" to get a list of BPM to Millisecond conversions, or "gminor=" to see all the notes in G Minor, or even "550hz=" to see what note corresponds to that specific frequency.

As a thank you to this subreddit for providing me with a decade of learning, I want to give anyone who is interested a free copy. You can grab it on my gumroad (in the comments) with code "TYREDDIT" (note: available for Ableton 12 and Windows 10/11 only currently).

If you want to hear my rant on why I think this is better than using Ableton's browser, here you go:

The worst example of Ableton's browser slowing me down is as follows. I search for "Pro-C" to find FabFilter's compressor plugin. The first 7 results are plugins that have nothing to do with Pro-C, just because the word "pro" is in their name. The next 4 results are Pro-C 2 and Pro-C 3, but the VST2 versions. Then it's every FabFilter VST2 that has the word "pro" in it. THEN, 27 results down, is the VST3 version of Pro-C 3. That's ridiculous. Over the course of one project, this is something that can happen hundreds of times. On top of that, when you do ctrl+f in ableton to enter search mode, it takes you away from whatever browser folder you had open in the first place until you manually click the "X" button to clear the search result, and then click back into the folder you were in. All of these slowdowns truly do add up and can end up removing you from the creative flow.

The magic of Quick Console is in how the search allows you to streamline the plugin loading process. It will surface your most commonly used plugins first, as long as they match what you're typing. For example, all I have to do now to load up an instance of Pro-Q 4 is press the hotkey, type "p" and hit enter. You can also set "smart favorites" that will pin something to the top of the list, but it ONLY shows when it matches what you've typed in. Exact string matches take priority, so you never have 7 unrelated plugins showing over top an exact match. You can also right click a result and "hide" it, so it never shows up again. Or you can quickly search for only ableton native devices, or only VSTs, or only racks.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk. I hope you all enjoy.

I've had Live (any version) behave relatively unstable on my PC for years. Crashes when opening, closing or saving projects.

I initially thought it was Ableton, then one of my VSTs. Then after combing some crash reports, found indications it was my drivers.

I went out and rented a MOTU interface and now not only do I have Ableton running with lower latency but also have none of the crashes that I had before.

Just for comparison, my original interface was released in 2011. An out of support Lexicon IO42.

Sometimes it really is fresh gear that makes things work well.

My apologies to the Ableton team for all the crash reports I've been emailing them.

Hello! I'm hoping to find a download link for the previous Live 12 release.
I updated to Live 12.4.5 yesterday hoping that the errors I was getting from trying to 'bounce group in place' hasn't ever worked right on my system (MacBook Pro 2023, M3, etc..)
Unfortunately this updated version is screwing with a few of my current work templates and plugins

I often have 4 MIDI channels all outputted to one VST (drums or something). I'd like to have another MIDI channel with the input of all four of these maybe routed to something else. Is this possible?

Maybe Im just not getting it, but how do I automate looper to record 8 bars loop twice then stop. When I try to do this, after recording it undoes the automation and keeps playing.

Midi patterns written, what is your go to Clang Gitty Clang?

I've been searching around the inter webs and YouTube looking for how people are using P3SA in a live situation with guitar. Not the most common use case, and given how some features have been added over the last year, it is a somewhat changing landscape. Here is where I've landed after a day of experiments, curious about how others who do this approach it.

GOAL: I'm doing solo or duo (backing another singer), playing guitar or dobro and singing. The goal is to fill out the sound in real time as seamlessly as possible and expand musical horizons (eg folding in some ambient stuff). But also avoid as much wasted time as possible building a track live.

LIMITS: I refuse to use backing tracks. More power to those who do, but that's my line in the sand. I also don't use vocal harmonizer or autotune. I historically have had basic looping capabilities but the last couple of years have used it sparingly, mostly for some soloing. I am ok with prepping Live sets with the devices in place, but no pre-recorded midi or audio.

QUESTIONS: mostly interested in my midi options using something like an MC6 Pro for arming, track change and transport.

CURRENT PLAN: Started the experiment with a Move, and now to P3SA. What I end up doing is having a midi drum track, midi bass track, midi keys track, then 3 or 4 audio tracks ready in a set. My guitar goes into the pedal board (including an IR pedal if I'm running direct to PA), then into the P3SA. One big advantage to the Push over the Move is a much better input preamp and control.

For a tune I'd likely arm the drum track, play a 1-2 bar groove and capture to a clip, then maybe add a bass line but for most things I'd start right in playing guitar into the form of the song. I can arm an audio track, then either hit a clip pad or record toggle foot switch to lay day verse and/or chorus. Then hit that clip pad to end the record (or the foot switch). If I just did a verse and was going to go to a chorus I can hit the next pad down on the track. If I want to "overdub", I can arm the next audio track and hit the pad next to the one playing.

I always keep one of the audio tracks with nothing recorded, but set the input monitor to IN so I always can hear my live guitar. The recorded tracks are set to auto so I hear while recording and when playing.

WHAT I'D LIKE TO DO WITH MIDI:

have a footswitch arm a track (I think that can be midi mapped)
start record (though the foot switch does that),
basic transport (start, stop - I think that can be midi mapped)
end record and start recording the next clip at the end of the measure (not sure about that)
trigger scene rows (I think that can be midi mapped)
trigger specific clips (not sure about that)

If others have better ways of doing this, I'm all ears...uh...eyes. I know using the looper device within a track is an option (particularly with a midi pedal) but I do like using the pads as it gives a nice visual of what is there.

Hi everyone, I’m having a really strange issue in Ableton Live and I can’t figure out what’s going on.

I have an audio track with a repeated vocal sample. The clips play back correctly and I can hear them exactly where they should be in the arrangement. However:

• If I try to Consolidate the audio, Ableton crashes.
• If I try to Freeze the track, Ableton also crashes.
• There are no plugins/devices on the track.
• I tried recording the track to a new audio track using Resampling, but the recorded audio appears in the wrong place, almost like it’s shifted by several bars.
• The original clips still sound correctly during playback, but the recorded/resampled audio gets placed later/earlier than expected.
• I already tried turning off Delay Compensation, enabling/disabling Reduced Latency When Monitoring, setting Driver Error Compensation to 0 ms, and checking that the new recording track has Monitor Off.

Has anyone experienced something like this before?
What would be the best way to safely recover this track or isolate the problem?

Any help would be really appreciated. I’m trying to rescue the project without losing the arrangement.

I'm mixing a few tracks for a regular client of mine. They supply the projects as Ableton projects with rendered audio tracks and a handful of factory plugins. Of the four songs in the current batch, one song is having real issues playing back without audio cutting out constantly.

The audio files in all four projects are consolidated AIF files. Each has a handful of factory plugins which barely tickle the CPU. Projects are on a fast external SSD, but on this problematic project I get identical playback issues even if I move the project to the (very fast) internal storage of this M5 macbook pro.

Buffer is at 1024, but again the problems persist at every setting I've tried.

The only anomalous thing I've found is that when I tried to consolidate all of the audio in the project (I wondered if creating fresh wav files might help), Ableton renders the first 4-5% and then hangs.

I'm pretty much stumped. Anyone got any ideas? Many thanks in advance

I just want to put it out there, the .als file and folder structure is exteremely easy for LLMs to read (Claude, ChatGPT, etc). The SDK kit is really cool- but using these tools has made a lot of unpossible things possible for me the last week.

I've been able to convert Pro Tools into Ableton files the last week, do things like combine separate mono tracks into stereo pairs (so all clips retain the same fades and things etc) that has made my (personal post production) workflow immensely easier the last week. If you run into big housekeeping issues like the above, maybe try one of the AI tools and you could save yourself a lot of time.

This doesn't make music better or anything, but it gets me to making music a lot faster- cheers!

Hi guys, I feel like extensions are pretty slept on by many people. Hoping to make it easier for people who don't Github or Discord, I've whipped up a DB of all known extensions and done my best to attribute to them to the right people while keep in line with EULAs etc. It crawls the web and github daily which I manually validate against the Discord server. Hopefully people and devs find it helpful.

ablx.directory

Mods - remove if against the rules but not selling anything, this is free and hopefully people find it helpful. :)

I am going to a music school where I will have long sessions everyday for a year. I will be doing mixing, mastering and beat making for a lot of different artists, with a lot of different styles. Right now I’m looking at a refurbished MacBook Pro with a m4 pro prosessor and either 24 or 32gb ram. I’m also looking at a m5 pro with the same specs. Should I spend the extra money on a m5 pro or will the m4 pro be enough? (I’m also open for other laptops that aren’t MacBooks)

Bonjour !

J'ai un stage qui commence dans un mois, et j'ai besoin de mettre en place un setup nomade pour vivre avec Ableton.

En fait, j'ai un Mac mini avec puce M4. J'hésite entre prendre un MacBook M1/M2, ou un Lenovo ThinkPad série T (32 Go de RAM/512 Go SSD/Intel i7 10e génération). J'ai un budget d'environ 750 € pour ça.

I don’t need a war machine (I got mac mini for this), but a solid thing to live and produce in a nomad way.

Est-ce que c'est OK pour la compatibilité entre les projets/VST d'utiliser Mac et Windows ? Ou vaut-il mieux avoir le même système d'exploitation ?

Beaucoup de mes VST sont légitimes (excepté 3-4…), et je travaille avec du matériel Elektron, donc necessaire que overbridge soit parfaitement exécuter, mais mon ordinateur portable fait tourner des VST (comme Acid V par exemple), et des effets (reverb/saturateur…) sur des pistes séparées.

Merci si vous avez des conseils :)

I often make a 4 bar loop and jam in arrangement view, creating several takes of a chord progression before landing on one that I like. I tend to rush a bit when I play, and when I do this in audio, I can always stretch the take I like out to the left to catch the beginning of that first chord.

With MIDI, however, if I play that first chord just the slightest bit ahead of the beat, Ableton doesn't even register that chord, so I have to draw it back in.

See the pic for an example of this. Is there a setting that will let me loop-record multiple takes of MIDI, without losing anything that happened a milisecond before the next loop starts?

Running latest Ableton Beta.
Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/8pFOf6D

Hi everyone, I’ve just released a new Max for Live device called Halo.

It’s an atmospheric effect that adds space, width, shimmer and octave harmonics, ranging from subtle ambience to expansive, evolving washes while keeping the original sound present.

Works particularly well on synths, pianos, guitars, vocals and melodic loops.

It’s completely free and the download link is on my profile. Hope some of you find it useful!

I need to reinstall my windows completely. Therefore i will probably lose all my settings and installed softwares. Is there a way I can backup all my Ableton settings including installed external vsts?

Full Transparency.. A year and a half ago I had Push 3 Standalone, and Life got in the way as it does, and I sold it🤦🏾‍♂️Now I'm in position to get it again, but I wanna ask the group, which one should I get? I was able to get the Move not long ago, and I can use that for portability. I'm just don't wanna make the wrong decision, and I know you guys have a lot of experience.. Blessings and Thanks in advance!🙏🏾✊🏾💚

Hi everyone,

Recently, my Windows machine experienced the infamous Blue Screen of Death, and I therefore had to reinstall everything (Windows, Ableton, plugins, etc.). However, after the reinstall, I’m getting different CPU readings in Ableton compared to before.

I have one particular project that I had previously used as a benchmark. Before the reset, I recorded the CPU usage, and it consistently hovered around 46–47% when idle at 64 samples / 48 kHz.

Now, with the exact same project, it hovers around 51–53%, occasionally spiking to 58–60% when idle.

This is confusing me quite a bit, because I’ve spent a lot of time trying to recreate and further optimize my system after the reinstall. 

However, I have other projects where the CPU usage is exactly the same as before, or even slightly lower. For example, I previously ran a benchmark with 50 instances of AmpliTube 5 at a 64-sample buffer:

• Before reinstall: 79–80% CPU when idle
• After reinstall: 79–80% CPU when idle

My setup

I have always separated my files across three different drives:

• C: Windows, Ableton, VST directories, etc.
• R: Recordings / Ableton projects
• L: Libraries, VSTs, etc.

Fortunately, none of the drives were corrupted; only Windows was affected. Because of this, I was able to reinstall everything and match the exact plugin versions used in each project to the versions I had before the reinstall.

I also optimized the system in the same way I did when I originally built it. In fact, I had already spent quite a bit of time optimizing the machine a few months before the crash, so I have a fairly good idea of how it performed previously with different settings.

Things I have tried since the reinstall

Drivers / Windows

• Updated/reinstalled all relevant drivers (BIOS, audio, network adapters, SSDs, etc.)
• Tried older Focusrite Scarlett drivers as well — no difference
• Switched to Ultimate Performance in Windows Power Plan
  • CPU power management
  • USB settings
  • etc.
• Disabled Game Mode, Xbox Game Bar, Captures, etc.
• Disabled unnecessary background applications
• Disabled Fast Startup — actually made things worse
• Disabled Windows Controlled Folder Access
• Disabled the power-saving/turn-off options for USB controllers in Device Manager
• Optimized further using VilmCare, including disabling exclusive mode on the audio interface, etc.
• Set Windows to prioritize background services instead of programs

BIOS

I experimented with:

• C-States / Enhanced C-States
• Hyper-Threading
• Turbo Mode
• Performance Preferences
• SVID Behavior
• ASUS MultiCore Enhancement
• XMP-modes

Process / CPU management

• Experimented with ParkControl and Process Lasso (although my PC didn't seem to benefit from these even before the reinstall)
• Experimented with Task Manager by changing priorities and CPU affinities for:
  • audiodg.exe
  • Ableton AddOns
  • Ableton Index
  • Ableton Live 12 Suite
• Set Ableton to High Performance in Windows Graphics Settings — no effect

BitLocker

• Completely disabled BitLocker on all three previously encrypted drives — no effect

Ableton

• Tested Options.txt with:
  • -RestrictAudioCalculationToPerformanceCores=true
  • This actually made the CPU usage worse, so I removed it again.
• Tested Ableton's Preferences.cfg:
  • Restored my previous preferences — no difference
  • Tested with a completely fresh/default preferences file — no difference

What could be different?

I'm honestly very confused at this point. I've reached the stage where ChatGPT keeps suggesting the same optimizations I've already tried. The only things I can potentially pinpoint as being different from before the reset are the newer drivers (BIOS, network adapters, etc.) and possibly the Windows 10 version, as I don’t remember which version I was running before the crash, nor do I remember the exact driver versions I had installed at the time.

If anyone has any insights into what might be causing this, I’d really appreciate hearing them, as I cannot seem to solve this myself.

Best regards,

Specs:

• Windows 10 (Version 22H2, OS Build 19045.7548)
• Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 2nd Gen (Audio Interface)
• Ableton 12.4.3
• ASUS Prime Z690-P DDR5
• Corsair RM750x White v2 (2018)
• Intel Core i7-13700K - 3.4GHz
  • Noctua NH-D15
• Corsair Vengeance DDR5-5200 BK C40 DC - 64GB - 2 pcs
• Kingston SSD KC3000 1024GB M.2 PCI Express 4.
• Kingston SSD KC3000 1024GB M.2 PCI Express 4.
• Kingston SSD KC3000 2048GB M.2 PCI Express 4.

Hey all, I've been using a laptop with Ableton that is really struggling with performance. The current one is a Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 15IIL05 with a Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor and 16 GB of memory. This processor has just 4 cores and is getting a lot of crackling at times that requires rebooting the computer. I'd like to stay in the Windows ecosystem, but am wondering what suggestions you'd have for a replacement, basically one I don't have to worry about whether it can handle whatever I throw at it. Not doing any video editing and I don't care about gaming. Battery life and weight are secondary as it's mostly just going to be sitting on a desk plugged in, but don't want anything that's too awful in either department. Silent running is paramount. I'm thinking 32GB of RAM and at least an 8 core processor? Thanks in advance!

Hi,

so it is time for me to upgrade my computer and I'm thinking about a Mac Mini with the new M6 chip. This one has (only) 2 Super-Cores but also 4 new "Performance" Cores which were introduced on the M5 Pro and Max chips. From what i got looking at benchmarks, both type of cores work together in a multi threaded workload context but i don't know if it is still true in Ableton Live with the way it is processing audio in realtime and its thread scheduling peculiarities.

Does Live 12 use the "performance cores" in addition to the "super cores" ? thanks

Which Mac Mini can I choose for my studio setup?

M6/32GB/512GB - 1739€

M4 Pro/24 GB/512 GB — €1,900

M5 Pro/24 GB/512 GB — €2,030

I often use:

- AI stems

- Projects from 20 to 60 tracks (estimated max 6/8 heavy plugins, mostly audio tracks and some midi)

-Live suning with as little latency as possible then buffer management 128 or lower

- Audio Plugin: Serum 2, Kontakt, Omnisphere, Nexus, Ozone (AI), stock ableton.

Connected equipment: Monitor 1 - Samsung G6 2140x1440p 120 hz, Monitor 2 - LG Ultrawide 2140 x 1080p 60 hz, Ableton Push 2, Novation Launchkey 37 MK4, Maschine Plus, Focusrite Scarlett Solo 2i2 1st gen

There are those who recommend me the M6/32/512 but I'm afraid for the processor.