Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

github.com

71–80 of 92 posts

Re: Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

#71
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've got 25 years of loops that basically to finish them need better arrangements Welcome to the club. You need to learn how to actually finish a track, which is the most difficult but also the most rewarding part. Why would you use AI for that? I mean, just listen to that demo track Codex made in the above repo, you surely don't want that. There's a good book about this, published by Ableton, you can read it for f…

To be fair, the demo track was one of the first I had it make, and I didn't put much effort into it because I thought it was especially funny with the macos "say" command vocals. It's a garbage-in, garbage-out situation. If you give it more musical direction you will get more out of it.

It's not just that the track is garbage (the "say" vocals are actually the least of its problems). Even if AI would make a good track: why use AI for creating your arrangements in the first place? Why this resistance to actually getting good at something? I can understand if your livelihood depends on it and you just need to be fast, but why for stuff you do for fun?

The book I mentioned has a good suggestion when struggling with arrangements: just copy. Take a track you really like, put it into your DAW, sync the speed and replicate its structure. You'll see that in many genres, structure is often exactly the same anyway. This can be an eye opener, and once you've realized this, you'll be able to experiment with structure in ways you couldn't do before. That's the fun part.

Re: Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

#72
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the demo track was one of the first I had it make, and I didn't put much effort into it because I thought it was especially funny with the macos "say" command vocals. It's a garbage-in, garbage-out situation. If you give it more musical direction you will get more out of it.

It's not just that the track is garbage (the "say" vocals are actually the least of its problems). Even if AI would make a good track: why use AI for creating your arrangements in the first place? Why this resistance to actually getting good at something? I can understand if your livelihood depends on it and you just need to be fast, but why for stuff you do for fun? The book I mentioned has a good suggestion when st…

Well, I do that too. I actually spend most of my music hobby time with my Ableton Move. I just happen to find it very fun to play with Codex as well.

Re: Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

#73
post #62

Interesting work and I’m really interested to see where this direction goes. One question I keep coming back to is where tools like this MCP go beyond templating, like what I already use heavily in Ableton Live. In music production, many tasks are repetitive but not identical and that’s exactly where something like this can shine. At the same time, music is widely seen as a "manual" craft. Every step in the chain fro…

Added an "Agent Audio Tap" Max for Live device that lets the agent analyze any part of the signal chain and optimize your mix based on that (or just make cool visualizations!)

https://github.com/bschoepke/ableton-live-mcp/blob/main/READ...

Re: Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

#74
post #15

Things I would use AI for in music production: 1. Generating track layouts (add tracks + empty audio/midi clips throughout) 2. Generating MIDI sequences 3. Generating Serum patches 4. Extracting stems from existing audio 5. Automating common workflows (eg sidechaining) 6. Semantic search of sample library That being said, I don't think I want a full agentic workflow for vibe-producing. Point solutions seems like a be…

> 6. Semantic search of sample library

I just pushed another tool for that! It wasn't exposed in the Live API but the implementation just issues the same queries to the underlying sqlite db that the Live GUI queries for the "Find Similar Sounds" feature.

Re: Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

#75
post #61

I wish there was something like this for flstudio. I've got 25 years of loops that basically to finish them need better arrangements. Using AI to auto generate sections is what I'm missing.

> I've got 25 years of loops that basically to finish them need better arrangements Welcome to the club. You need to learn how to actually finish a track, which is the most difficult but also the most rewarding part. Why would you use AI for that? I mean, just listen to that demo track Codex made in the above repo, you surely don't want that. There's a good book about this, published by Ableton, you can read it for f…

on a side note, his early 2000s output is genius

Re: Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

#76
This is really cool!

This kind of automation will allow impaired people to have access to a whole new world of creation. Blind and motor impaired comes to mind.

Re: Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

#77
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that the track is garbage (the "say" vocals are actually the least of its problems). Even if AI would make a good track: why use AI for creating your arrangements in the first place? Why this resistance to actually getting good at something? I can understand if your livelihood depends on it and you just need to be fast, but why for stuff you do for fun? The book I mentioned has a good suggestion when st…

Well, I do that too. I actually spend most of my music hobby time with my Ableton Move. I just happen to find it very fun to play with Codex as well.

I agree that having an MCP Ableton can make total sense. After many years of use, I would say I know Ableton quite well, but nowadays, I regularly ask ChatGPT if certain things could be done differently/more efficiently, and it often surprises me with new ways of doing things. For instance, sometimes Ableton has gotten new features over the years I'm not aware of. It surely would be nice to have this integrated via MCP.

I think you would get much better feedback if you'd focus on these use cases: flattening the learning curve for newcomers, and new ideas for experienced users, rather than creating tracks completely by AI. Because in that case, why even go through a DAW and not use Suno directly?

Re: Show HN: Ableton Live MCP

#79

Yes! I want this for MainStage -- this would allow me to automate my weekly template setup for playing at my church. Each week before practicing I look up the songs in Planning Center and create a new MainStage concert file with one patch per song, and add notes to each patch screen with the song's key, etc. Automating this would save me the time of doing the busy work and get right to practicing.

We should talk! I have a cli that does exactly this, I was able to reverse engineer the MainStage concert format
Post reply on HN