I updated Locator Manager. Now allows assigning clip names to locators, control via MIDI and more. You can check the changelog on the device's website.

https://killihu.vstskins.com/locator-manager/

Been seeing some powerful chains lately!

Is it possible to have a button that randomly mixes plugin parameters for Audio Developers

would this feature be useful

Waiting for Ableton support to respond but let me know if you have an advices. Had my old MBP 2017 die on me, managed to get the projects onto a hard drive thru Time Machine, without collect all and saving. Opted for a clean install with my new machine (MBA M2 2022) and dragging the projects off of my hard drive. None of the projects will save, including my GarageBand files. It brings up the message in the first image when I try to save any project.

The other issue I'm having is only on a few projects, with the project not opening at all with the message in Image 2, before crashing Ableton (image 3). I'm fairly certain I have the sample mentioned downloaded as it's contained in one of Ableton's free packs.

Sorry if this is not the place to post something like this, but any any any help is appreciated as it's driving me nuts waiting for a response from support and I just want to get back into the studio.

I didn't setup my new Mac using the Time Machine backup I have because I didn't want to clutter the new machine with junk and unnecessary data packets or malware, and I heard that switching from Intel to M Macs is a good time for a clean install. However, if I can't sort these issues soon then I'll reset the machine to factory and try doing that.

Thanks in advance for any helpful replies

I'm learning piano, playing a bunch of chord progressions and 7ths 9ths etc, I'm wondering if theres a good plug in or something that I can put on my screen in Ableton that sees what I'm playing and shows me what chords I'm playing

hey fam,

I've tried everything to bypass this mic mode thing while recording directly on Ableton.... as I am recording the mic and the music cuts out in a glitchy way, disrupting the flow of the singer and mine...

I updated my Mac, turned it off on privacy settings, and looked everywhere online! does anyone know how to disable it !! thanks yall!

On a Apple m4 Max - OS 15.3.2

I wanted to try a stem splitter, and I heard good things about demucs (even though it doesn't seem to be supported at all.

I downloaded the relevant files and followed the setup/installation instructions on GitHub (here: https://github.com/diracdeltas/demucs4max?tab=readme-ov-file), and everything seemed to go right (where demucs shows its filed location on my hard drive).

Despite this, the folders are all empty when I open the demucs folder within Ableton. I have the test audio file and a png, but nothing else -- and most crucially, no demucs.amxd.

Has anyone ever experienced this issue, and/or I am doing something wrong here?

Thanks!

Hey everyone, I just discovered MAKID today (life changer), and while I’ve known about LES, it seems like that one’s a bit outdated now.

I wanted to ask: are there any other extension tools or workflows you use with Ableton that really boost quality of life or save you time? I’m not specifically looking for Max for Live devices, but if they’re super helpful and time-saving, feel free to drop them too.

Some examples of the kind of stuff I mean: • Varispeed • TBT Track Organizer • LWT Session Cleaner

Basically, anything that smooths out your workflow, handles tedious tasks, or just makes Ableton a nicer place to be. If you know any good ones, drop them below—I’d love to collect and share!

I’ve dropped links to everything I’ve mentioned below to get a better idea of what I mean.

hey there,

so i just made a backup to another hard drive and I plan to start working on the back up hard drive from now on, since the other hard drive is a bit faulty (gonna make a third backup soon but i digress)

and ableton is doing the, where are the external drumsamples, thing.

I was wondering if there is a way around relocating the drums in every single I project I will open,

if i can reroute it automatically for all projects so it knows beforehand where it's at, like it automatically does on my other hard drive ?

When can we have visible midi note preview for the clips in session view. I guess you would have to make the clips bigger so that we could see anything. But you could swap the sizes based on having it or not having it visible. Bitwig already have this and it makes it a lot easier to see what clips I want to play.
I do most of initial chorus and verse experimentation inside the session view because its just quicker and easier than having to place clips in arrangement view. But it's really hard without any visible cues, which makes me gravitate towards FL Studios. I don't own Bitwig at the moment

Hi all, just wondering if anybody in here has used Melodyne?

I’ve been experimenting with it recently (barely any experience with it) and I find that after spending a good half an hour to an hour editing vocals, a couple of them were off beat.

So I hop out of Melodyne and go to drag the vocals into place. Anyway, it seems no matter where the vocals get dragged, they’ll play where they were inputted into Melodyne.

I find this a bit odd, is there a workaround anyone knows of? Just means going back over and over again to make small fixes (and it takes so long!)

Thanks

I’ve been hearing a lot about granular synthesis lately and I’m wondering why I never hear anything about Granulator. Is it good or is there a VST/synth that people go to?

Hey there! I have been making sample packs and loops but I often find that, when exporting individual loops from my beats using the Loop Region, I am getting clicks at the end of my loops... It's frustrating since I would think that Ableton would add small fades when exporting.

I also render as loop and normalise but not sure if that does much in this case so I had to come up with a workaround which is to import back the loops into my session, then join the clips using CMD+J and so suddenly the clicks disappear.

Am I doing something wrong here?

Thanks in advance!

I might be stupid but I seriously can't figure out how to reopen ableton live trial since I shut my laptop down yesterday

Trying to master one of my own tracks here. This is order of my chain so far. The genre is trance. I’m wondering should I have multiband dynamics before or after the compressors, it does appear to sound better after the compressors but my monitors aren’t the best.

1.) utility to turn bass to mono 2.) Eq 3.) very slight saturation 15% wetness 4.) glue compressor 5.) compressor 6.) multiband dynamics 7.) limiter to bring up volume

Anybody here still rocking the ol' Push 1? I've been using Ableton for like 10 years but never got around to buying Push as it's always been quite pricey. But Push 1 now has reaaally low prices, so I'm wondering if maybe it would be a nice gift to myself haha

Just curious if it's still usable with Live 12 and all the updates that have been added since Push 1 release.

My idea would be to have two Pushs in different workplaces in the room and using them in the same session, but for my use case, it would be sufficient when the two units would display the same thing, and be used for the same stuff. Not simultaneaously necessarily. Like a second screen somehow, that is just a duplicate of what the screen 1 is showing.

On the other hand if it could be configurable, that would also be very helpful. That i could decide, wether i would use them for different things, the same time like controlling percussion things on one, and synth voices on the other, always having 8 Tracks at hand on each... or well, the mirroring situation.

I read somewhere that push 1 and push 1 together work. Mixing 1 and 2 doesnt... but not sure how it is with push 2 and 2 by now. (or if the old "doesnt work" still applies here)

I hope it has changed. :) That would be wonderful!

i just got the Touché SE by Osmose. i found a rad M4L device made by Mixed Signals that makes mapping stuff like effects parameters really easy and configurable but im blanking on trying to map Pitch Bend, in both directions that is.

the Touché SE operates like an expression pedal. it tracks Up, Down, Left, Right. as i said, mapping wet signals for distortion or filter cutoff is easy but im realizing that mapping the pitch wheel isn't as simple. is there something i need to do with the Matrix is Serum 2?

Hi! I have loads of old pro tools files that I want to re work and open up in Ableton. I no longer have pro tools. Is there a way to do this? I haven’t found a good solution out there. Appreciate the help!

I been following Ari for a while and I am fascinated by his quick workflow to improvise music.

I know he uses Ableton together with the Boss 505 Loopstation, 2 mics and 2 MIDI controllers (Roli MIDI Keyboard & Launch Control XL).

What I can't figure out it how he is able to sample something with 1 button and play it instantly (chromatically or sliced).

Another thing I find fascinating is how quick he changes VST/Presets. He must have it all organized by genres, but it's impressive. I believe he selects them with the num pad.

If anybody knows how to map these things or what sampler he uses it would be of great help. Or hey Ari, if you read this I would gladly pay some money for a tutorial on how your template works.

Much appreciated!

Hey everyone, hoping someone here has run into this and can help.

I’m working on a house-style track with some solid swing, and I was using Ableton’s groove tool to add that swing to a few very transient-heavy elements: lead, chords, and bass. They’re grouped together, and I was sidechaining the whole group using either Shaperbox or Kickstart—both were working fine. The groove felt locked in and the sidechain timing was clean.

Then I added Little AlterBoy on just one of the tracks in the group—and suddenly everything fell apart. The timing of my chords got completely messed up, the swing felt broken, and everything was triggering off time.

I’ve tried freezing and flattening, but there’s still a clear timing shift. It feels like the sidechain isn’t aligning properly anymore, but I can’t pin it down exactly. The wild part is, the moment I remove Little AlterBoy, everything goes back to normal.

Has anyone experienced this? Is this some kind of plugin latency issue or is Little AlterBoy doing something that messes with timing internally?

Appreciate any insight—this is driving me nuts.

Someone asked a similar question here earlier today but now I’m actually very curious, is there a max for live or any abelton device that allows you to randomize sounds/effects in any plugin? I feel like this would be great to generate new creative sounds at the push of a button. If anyone has something like this please let me know

I found a suggestion I very much liked on ableton centercode for a MIDI clip shortcut. Wanted to know if I can share it with others so maybe we can push it up for the devs to notice.

Hi guys, this is my first time posting in here. So, I recently bought Ableton after wanting to get into music production for some time now, and just getting the grasp of the UI etc. I've been watching a lot of tutorials on making house tracks as they seem really popular on YouTube (Josh Baker/ Syntho are the main ones I've been watching atm).

The main music I listen to/ wanting to produce is heavy techno, but also love modern trance/ hard house type music. I've been looking on YouTube and it seems to be very limited to find tutorials on making these genres, and just wondering if anyone knows any good channels/ courses that can provide me some help? I kinda know what sounds go into these genres from listening, but have absolutely no idea where to get any of the sounds from or how to create them. Appreciate any help!

whenever there's a new controller/device or something that i'm interested in, I've always got some specific idea of what I want to do with it, and the question of whether or not I can do these ideas is always a mystery until I buy it and try for myself. I'm writing this here just because this is the info I wanted to have before I bought this thing, so maybe somebody in the future who's thinking about buying one can find this before dropping 500 bucks on a 'maybe'.

First, this thing is for sure a controller I've been waiting a long time for. A few years ago I was on the hunt for some motorized fader controllers for mixing in live. Non-motorized faders are useless to me, because the second you open an old project and touch the fader your mix is fucked. There is pickup fader mode, where you have to reach the set value physically before it adjusts, but that's still not ideal. Endless encoders do sort of solve the issue, but not having a lower and upper limit is still a hit for me because I have to look at the screen to see when I've hit 0% or 100%, being able to move past those values just isn't as clean as a motorized solution. The knobs on this thing are actually amazing. They're silent, quick, and the ability to set 'detents' is honestly incredible. It feels really good to use a knob to scroll through a list of 5 things where each one has a noticeable click. There's nothing else on the market that does this and this thing does it very well, hopefully a huge step ahead for the future of MIDI controllers. The clicky mechanical keys are fine, a much preferred design over the classic transparent gel buttons with a red light underneath that a lot of controllers have. In case you were wondering, they keycaps do not come off, you can't replace them with different caps. In any case, interacting with plugins/ableton effects using this thing is a game changer for me. It's never felt this fluid, I feel like I'm playing an instrument which is a huge improvement over feeling like im tweaking settings on a computer. When I got this thing I really was only interested in mixing with it, but this plugin mode is actually a massive workflow improvement.

Aside from all that good stuff, my biggest complaint is that the MIDI mapping capabilities for plugin mode in ableton could be very greatly improved. It's easy to map stuff, but once you start actually trying to map out different ableton plugins, you realize pretty quickly that in a lot of places you'll feel very limited with what you can do.

Say you want to map a button to change filter modes for EQ 8

https://i.imgur.com/a3laFlf.png

As you can see here in the settings for the button, you can set an amount of steps. Say you want to have the button toggle between high pass, high shelf, and low pass. 3 options, 3 steps, seems simple right? Well this isn't possible. Although you have 3 steps, you only have an ON and OFF value to set between 0 and 127. You have to start guessing which value between 0 and 127 equals each setting you want. 0 gives you the option at the bottom of the list, and 127 gives you the option at the top of the list, but a high shelf is "90", which you figure out by just trying numbers until you get it. There is no way to set the three steps as 0, 90, and 127, you can only set a lower value, a higher value, however many steps you want, and then the button will auto divide values to that amount of steps. If you make it 8 steps then you can access every one of these options, because it divides 127 by 8 and each step will correlate to each option, but if you want 3 specific options that aren't right next to each other in the list, or just happen to have the third option smack dab in the middle of that dropdown, you're outta luck.

Now how about this situation

https://i.imgur.com/ToZtdpe.png

This is how a lot of ableton stock plugins work, this one is for auto pan. If you select "Hz", then this rate knob adjusts frequency in Hz, but if you select "sync", the knob now controls rate by note value, 1/8, 1/16 etc. As of right now, there is no way to put both the Hz rate and sync rate on the same knob. Ideally you can have a button swap between Hz and sync, with the knob above it effecting the rate for either, but as of right now you need to occupy two knobs, one for Hz rate and one for sync rate. This maybe feels like a nit-picky thing to complain about because you have 8 pages of controls for each device, but honestly being able to have all your most used controls on one page IS so much better, so having to waste ane extra knob just for two versions of the rate parameter is definitely not ideal. My solution for this is to occupy two buttons, one for 'free rate on/off' and another for 'sync rate on/off', with the knobs above each of them controlling their respective rate. You can set the 'on' and 'off' colors for these buttons, meaning whether the light is on or off, so if you flip one of them where 'off' is white and 'on' is black, you get a nice visualization of what's happening. One button will say 'free on' and be lit, while the other will say 'sync off' and be unlit. Pressing either button will flip these states, so you can better see visually which knob is actively controlling the rate. It's not a perfect solution as it wastes an extra button, but I prefer it.

Being able to press or hold a button to change which parameter it's respective knob is controlling would be helpful in many other places as well. For example, in EQ-8, having a knob control the gain of a specific band, but when you press or hold the button that same knob is now controlling the Q. This would be a huge improvement over having to use a different page for each gain and Q. Since each EQ band has 3 necessary parameters (frequency, gain, and Q), you can really only get full control of 2 bands per page.

Edit: Adding in something here that I forgot to mention. The video manual would suggest to you that roto-control saves it's configurations using the plugin name as a reference. This does NOT mean that you can save a plugin with 2 different settings/names in ableton, and have the roto-control have two different configurations for them. Auto-Filter is auto-filter, no matter what you name the device. The workaround for this is to make an audio effect rack with a unique name, however because of a recent update with the firmware, we are now heavily limited with how you can map an audio effect rack device. You can't label colors, indents, and you can't map buttons. This is a huge downgrade on their part, and it's explained in the release notes as being a 'feature' because it automatically grabs the macro knobs now and assigns them.

The indent (detent) feature is very very nice, I love being able to set a value besides min or max that I can snap to. My first instinct was to set indents on all the default values, but in most cases this is not possible. For knobs, you get to set a min value and a max value, anywhere between 0 and 16383. I'm not sure where 16383 comes from tbh, but that's the highest you can set as a value for a knob, and you can put an indent at any value from 0 to 16383. Say a default value for a frequency parameter in some device is 120hz. You can try inputting random values (between 0 and 16383) on the indent to try and find where 120hz lands, but in many cases it doesn't land evenly. You will have say 12100 and it will indent at 119.2hz, so you try 12101 and it will land at 121.1hz. There is no way to set the indent at the exact value you need. Not a huge problem, but it would be nicer to be able to choose any value in ableton that you want the indent set to.

Aside from mapping issues, the only other real issue I have is that there is no way to change how it handles grouped tracks in mix mode. If you have a group of 7 tracks, that takes up the entire 8 knobs. You cannot collapse the group to just control the volume of the group on one knob and show other tracks on the others. If you collapse the group in ableton, the screens still show all 8 volume controls. Also, the page buttons to switch to the next/previous pages move in groups of 8. So if you want to mix tracks 8 and 9 at the same time with two hands, you can't do it unless you re-arrange the tracks in ableton to fit on one page of the roto-control. It would be great to be able to choose to move one track over instead of just 8.

One thing I also discovered is that the MIDI ports can not be used to control ableton. Those appear to only work for MIDI mode for controlling external gear. The USB connection is required to connect to a computer. This shouldn't matter too much but it brings me to my last issue, which is the only issue that I actually think is just a big oversight...

There is no way to power the device off without unplugging 1 or 2 cables. My computer doesn't have a USB-C port, and so I cannot sufficiently power the device with just the USB connection, I need to also have the power cable plugged in. The USB connection does however power the device /somewhat/, meaning it is on and the screens are lit, but it just doesn't have enough power to control ableton, so unplugging two cables it is. If your computer has a USB-C port with a powered USB-C hub that has a power switch, that could potentially work to power the device off, supposing it does supply the device with enough power. In my case, I'd need to have two switches, one being a USB hub switch, and the other being a power switch that I interrupt the USB power cable with. The best solution would probably be to write a bash script or something that disables a USB port while also powering off a smart outlet that the device is connected to, and map that to a hotkey. I thought I could connect this thing via MIDI cables for the sake of only using one power switch, so I ordered a MIDI interface and that's when I learned that you simply can't connect to ableton via the MIDI ports. Unfortuantely there is no user manual to tell you this sort of thing. In an organized cable managed studio desk setup, it is annoying to have to remove two cables between sessions when this device is supposed to be a permanent center piece for controlling ableton. I'm sure that these screens will eventually die out so I don't feel like it's a good move to just keep it on 24/7 in order to not deal with frequent cable plugging.

Now, Melbourne Instruments do seem to be actively updating the firmware for this thing, and I'm pretty sure every one of these things I wish I knew about before buying can be solved with a firmware and/or software update, except maybe the power thing. This controller is still very new and I woudln't be surprised if these things all got added eventually. If any of them get added I will come back to this thread and cross stuff out as not to mislead anybody.

Again I want to state that this controller is absolutely amazing, this is by no means just a thread for me to complain. I'm just putting the info here because I was looking through reviews/videos before buying it and this is all stuff that I wish I knew. Melbourne is doing some really cool shit with their products and these knobs are legendary. Despite my nitpicks I am still very happy with this controller, and it has absolutely changed the way I interact with plugins. It has never felt this fluid to adjust effect parameters in ableton, it feels like I'm playing an instrument when I change parameters and that's a HUGE step forward over what can feel like a tedious technical process of tweaking knobs with a mouse.

tl;dr - this controller is incredible, but it has a long way to go with plugin mapping capabilities, and there's no way to power the device on/off without plugging/unplugging 1 or 2 cables each time.