Far too much of Ableton's secret sauce is hidden away behind Max for Live and top-tier pricing only features. This is a great step in the right direction.
There are massive communities around tools far more simple than Ableton was even a decade ago, like SP404, Akai MPCs, Elektron Digitakt.
Many musicians treat any item as an instrument, not as a plaform. There are probably dozens of videos on youtube, where musicians explain, why they use more limited tools instead of Ableton.
To make a successful music tool (that includes DAW), you have to own a powerful workflow, that some group of musicians love or need. Extensibility is fine, but not the only way to succeed.
There are now people making music on pocket trackers that have ± same amount of features as modplug Tracker I used in the end of 90s.
The thing is, when you make a music with a guitar, you don't want your guitar to be 'built around composable scripted modules'. You want to play an instrument, and the UX should enable it, and generally get out of the way.
I am not proposing that someone needs to disrupt or make Ableton obsolete.
I am suggesting that the existence of Reaper strongly implies that there's an under-served demographic of people who (correctly) understand that the DAW can be more than a way to translate audio data from buffers to hard drive and VST host.
In the same way that there is currently a lot of innovation in mixers that don't just sum channels, it's not at all unreasonable to imagine that the DAW itself could be an instrument or at least provide composable functions that make other instruments more interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EclavOHIo4o
One of the best things about the golden age of music tools that we're experiencing is that guitars and guitarists have been decentered from the conversation. We don't call them guitar pedals anymore; they are effects pedals now. We're moving past the GROG TURN OVERDRIVE ON OR OFF phase into a much cooler place where pedals are usually MIDI controlled and often have CV inputs as well. Arguably the most lauded pedal of 2025 was the Polyend Mess, which literally allows sequencing of effects. It's awesome!
The cool thing about a truly composable modular DAW is that it doesn't have to get more complex. Being able to strip things down is also totally valid. Perhaps then folks wouldn't be making such a big deal about Tape:
Ableton and Max are totally separate codebases, and "Max for Live" is just a ~VST interface between them.
I do agree that "scriptable Ableton" would be far better for production and sound design than Max, because they make all the hard parts easy: MIDI, sequencing, mixing, etc.
In Max, you have to build everything from scratch, every time.
This is not strictly true, and Max for Live (M4L) is much more than a pseudo-VST. In the context of Live, the Max runtime is controlled by the DAW, which itself then exposes part of its interface to Max. So there's realtime bi-directional communication going on, more akin to how Propellerhead Software's (now deprecated) ReWire protocol used to work, the host passing control information (transport position, note data, etc.) and audio buffers into the client software and vice-versa. There is some superficial similarity with VST in this sense, but with M4L it's much more deeply integrated into the DAW as a whole. The Live Object Model[1], while not complete, is extensive, and there is very little that is off-limits to a M4L device to manipulate, with the caveat that care must be taken to avoid overflow of the control stream coming back from Max into Live (certain operations must be placed in the low-priority scheduler thread).
This new API gives much of the same control that M4L already did, but without having to have Max involved.
>In Max, you have to build everything from scratch, every time.
Again, not strictly true. Editing a M4L device opens the full Max environment, which has a snippets[2] feature much like any other good IDE. You can easily build a large library of boilerplate code for your own specific purposes with it. There are also many basic examples included out of the box.
I don't own Max for Live. If I want to use it, I either need to upgrade to Ableton Suite for $500 or I need to upgrade to Standard and buy Max for Live separately (also $500).
There's a huge ecosystem of tools that are implemented as Max for Live packages which I cannot access because I haven't paid the toll.
I see that even this new Extensions SDK is only available to people who have paid for the full Suite edition.
I'd describe that as a market opportunity.
The other way around. Ableton exposes some internal modules to Max for Live as Max for Live modules.
What Ableton gets from Max for Live is not internals, but basically a few Ableton-only Max-built plugins, that could as well use VST underneath.
It's not about special powers, just being forced to pay the gatekeeper to the otherwise free/OSS ecosystem.
i've been making my own vst instruments and effects with faust, and codex knocks it out of the park; it's basically a trivial task
the only problem is that i have to use software that's external to DAWs. it's only a matter of time before this is first class in DAWs
This is just what I've been looking for. I never warmed to Max for Live for mods. But the extensions SDK I can get behind.
One of the features that got me hooked on Ableton Live was how easy it was to do "analog style" audio recording of whatever you're hearing in realtime...not bounce, render, or sample to another device (it can do all of these too). For the master bus - just create an audio track, arm for recording and set input to "Resampling". Can do the same with any number of tracks/groups. This is critical to me for capturing ideas in realtime and continually reprocessing/resampling as I go.
I was astonished when I first started making digital music 20 years ago that this isn't a standard feature in every DAW. Some DAWs (REAPER, Bitwig, AudioMulch) do this as easily, others (Logic, Reason) have workarounds.
For example, ableton was famousley co-created by the members of the monolake, a pioneer of minimalist techno in the 90ies. Some history there: https://www.roberthenke.com/interviews/ableton.html
-Emu
-Plugin Alliance
-UAD
-Autotune
-Burl
Besides that, Ableton themselves list a bunch of tools I assume works on some level, as they're listed in the help pages of Ableton: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012680119-Best...
With tight deadlines, there frequently isn't the time to not be working concurrently on the same doc, especially when it comes to anything technical.
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.
They already had Python. Mentioning an architecturally obvious idea in a job application is likely to read as insulting, because it presumes their engineers weren’t already aware of that possibility.
That's a bit much no, why would it be insulting? "Great minds think alike" would be my reaction, instead of "Ew, duh, of course we thought of that, you think we stupid?".
Then I can make a meaningful comparison.
Ableton Extentions if a first class api to Live, kind of like AppleScript.
Ableton is another beast altogether, and I've also been trying to get it running for years at this point, no end in sight. Last time I tried, after being recommended https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux (now sadly archived), I managed to get the actual UI to render and be interactive, but still couldn't get proper audio to work with my interface, only software rendered audio, so the quest continues...
> The challenges were many: we had to create an operating system, we needed to deal with porting Live to Linux, we needed to deal with all the gory details of WiFi and authorization.
Biggest issue with having something so easy to work with is the huge amount of extensions we will be getting, which makes it harder to find the jewels.
Also wondering if we will get extensions for Abelton Move as well. There are already a couple of hacks that are adding functions that are running as a sidecar. This could give them an official API.
Well, they have it buried because it's not "the interface for AI", it's a programming interface, that could have existed 5 and 10 years ago, pre-AI. And in other DAWs, it did.
It just happens that a programmatic interface is also very usable as an AI target. But that's orthogonal.
Also: yes, this SDK is a great interface for AI. It was trivial for Claude to quickly write a MCP extension. There is a lot of room to open up the API more and to save on tokens, but I already had fun sketching out new songs or open older projects with clips in session view and just tell Claude "create an arrangement out of them".
My initial take on its strengths/weaknesses:
- Strong: Using the TS/JS ecosystem to render UI and tools
- Medium: Creating custom application windows in a web view. Window management features are pretty limited currently (can’t resize or render a native “close” button on the window chrome)
- Strong: Creating custom control panels for integrating with external services (like pushing and pulling audio clips or midi to/from an external service)
- Weak: Anything real-time, that’s still the domain of Max4Live or other control APIs, so don’t expect playback automation
- Medium: Tinkering with the Ableton project, clips, tracks, etc. API surface is still incomplete. Like I can read warp markers but not create them, for example. And I can’t access the global time signature settings.
The extensions are pretty aggressively sandboxed, and I appreciate that security consciousness in this season of the js ecosystem. It’s a hassle though if you want to save or load files outside of your little sandbox folder.
Gotta say, slightly sad about the global time signature not being available to get/set, when I read about the new SDK yesterday my mind immediately jumped to bunch of use cases which all use the global time signature :P Oh well, I'm sure it'll be available in the future.
Which is a bummer, because LOM is fantastic for what it does, but has many many many frustrating gaps. Like, it cannot add devices to the master/main track. It can’t read MIDI pitch bend events, etc.
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)
Have a dig around here: https://docs.cycling74.com/apiref/js/
It would be TRIVIAL in any other language, but noooo, I have to write a fucking max patch and deal with their trash visual syntax and runtime.
I get the frustration coming to Max as a regular developer, but actually when I bothered to learn it was one of the most rewarding uses of time and I find it really quite fun to work in (and frustrating sometimes of course! But the JS support helps). You just need to forget everything you know about programming lol
You can see this 'bare-bones' style of Max with Miller Puckette's continuation of his original work in Pure Data[1] (aka Pd). The nice thing about Pd is that it's open source, so all the scheduling and signal flow logic can be examined and understood. As I understand it, the basics of Pd are comparable to how Max still works under the hood, though no doubt there has been some deviation over the years.
As it is now, Max offers a very smooth interface to the basic paradigm that was established 40 years ago, with many modern advances, but the fundamental idea hasn't changed all that much since it first came out.
If you really hate having to work through a GUI for computer music there's always SuperCollider[2] and its many derivatives (Sonic Pi, TidalCycles, etc.). It's nice to have options!
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". :-)
Try slowing the PSX opening sound by 5x to 10x, you won't regret it.
Time to see what's possible with the new SDK.
