Experiments with Ableton-MCP(jhurliman.org) |
Experiments with Ableton-MCP(jhurliman.org) |
I like this because I'm really in the creative process still, it feels like a tool like "Scaler" (nice tool btw) where you're picking origin notes, but really putting the song together yourself. It can suggest "Synth Bass" but I'm the one assigning it from one of my other VSTs sounds, mixing, picking, etc.. And if all goes well playing some lead on the guitar or seaboard and then deleting it all and starting over.
Generally, it would be nice of Ableton to release an official documentation of their API.
So far I've completed roughly 70% of the Ableton Live project-file XML parsing, though some parts like Session View and the Groove Pool are not finished yet.
As for using Claude or other agents to parse Ableton Live's XML, my original plan was to build an automated workflow with ableton-mcp: have Claude use ableton-mcp to make edits in a blank project (for example, add an EQ8 or modify some automation), save the project file, then have Claude compare the modified project file with the original blank project and write the corresponding parsing code. But ableton-mcp still lacks many features[2], and the XML schema of .als files is inconsistent, so I ended up doing most of the review and verification manually.
[1]: https://github.com/krfantasy/alsdiff [2]: https://github.com/ahujasid/ableton-mcp/pulls
Seems though that working with those AI tools appeals to the author, that they learned and had fun, so I guess that makes it a good usecase for them specifically?
I think this tooling could be useful in the hands of more capable musicians / audio engineers / etc. as there are often repetitive tasks in DAWs and it could potentially unlock new workflows that would have been too tedious without knowing how to program.
The organizational and assistive ability though was/is outstanding, and using it in my own projects honestly made me sad that we're seeing AI integration everywhere that automates the creative work and leaves you with the tedious work. I don't expect we'll see AI updates to DAWs from vendors anytime soon with features like "speak into your mic and tell your DAW to group all the snares, color code them different shades of red, and rename them", but that's the part of the process I wish we were trying to get AI to tackle.