Ableton Extensions SDK

29 points by bennett_dev 2 hours ago | 8 comments

iainctduncan 31 minutes ago |

For people into this sort of thing, another option is using my foss Max extension, Scheme for Max, to script Live through the live API using Scheme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0sKBA-Pv2c&t=1s

The live object model is MUCH nicer to use in a lisp, as basically you do everything by making dynamic lists to represent what you want to access! There are examples in the Scheme for Max help file.

(Also, Scheme for Max can run in the scheduler thread, unlike JS in Max. Though of course calls to the Live API are deferred to the lower priority thread anyway)

abstractbill 29 minutes ago |

A couple of times I've tried somewhat seriously to build "google docs for ableton" (meaning two people editing the same project on different computers, seeing each other's edits in realtime). Frustratingly I decided it was impossible to do a really good job of it back then. This sounds like it might finally make it doable!

macscam 1 hour ago |

This is great to see. Not widely known, but it's already been possible to write Python extensions for Ableton using the LOM, which I was doing via ClyphXPro. But this looks easier!

iainctduncan 33 minutes ago | |

Yeah, that was what got me into Live in the first place! Writing custom control surfaces in python from the reverse engineered stuff.

Nice to see they have put out options they will officially support though. I do admire that instead of saying "no you can't" they just said "we know those open python example scripts our there and we won't comment on them". :-)

moralestapia 1 hour ago |

>Extensions are built on the NodeJS platform, a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment.

I applied for a job with them and proposed this exact thing about 8 years ago (got auto-rejected, I would've been very happy to work on it).

But I'm glad to see they finally did it.

Kye 1 hour ago | |

You could already use Node through M4L. I'm not clear on what this adds that wasn't already possible.

nopayne 49 minutes ago | | |

With M4L you need to implement your feature in a device and add it to your project. My Ableton project template has a bunch of these on my main track. With extensions you use a context menu as the entry point which will hopefully be more lightweight. Hopefully they'll expose more of the object model over time and let us trigger these via keyboard/midi shortcuts.

moralestapia 1 hour ago | | |

They made extensions first class, chose JavaScript as the primary language, and chose node.js as its runtime.