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Experiments with Ableton-MCP

jhurliman.org

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Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#11

Post by jhurliman »

schrijver wrote: post #10
geooff_ wrote: post #3

This is super cool. Using LLMs to mix together two songs that don't belong mixed together is a great usecase.

It’s a method like any other. The process took him two days, after the LLM suggested which track to mix (like he was working for the LLM instead of the other way around?). Two days is more than enough to learn how to make a mashup in Ableton without LLM’s. 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?

Author here, I think you’re spot on. If I set out specifically to make a mashup and spent the same number of hours working toward that goal I think I could have gotten to the same place. This was a journey that started with wrapping my head around MCP and LLM local software interoperability, and my Ableton knowledge leveled up a lot along the way.

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.

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#12

Post by jphorism »

Awesome stuff. Seems to me like one great use case of an MCP for Ableton would be to develop muscle / workflow memory for music production workflows. Adjacently, I've started using Perplexity a bunch for this sort of thing because it indexes YouTube tutorial transcripts. Any thoughts on how to design MCPs for learning Ableton better?

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#13

Post by jhurliman »

jphorism wrote: post #12

Awesome stuff. Seems to me like one great use case of an MCP for Ableton would be to develop muscle / workflow memory for music production workflows. Adjacently, I've started using Perplexity a bunch for this sort of thing because it indexes YouTube tutorial transcripts. Any thoughts on how to design MCPs for learning Ableton better?

One thing I don’t cover in the blog post is ensuring your MCP tool calls are well documented. (If it’s an existing MCP you can do this with a README or instructions file.) I saw a jump in efficiency when I manually edited the docstrings with examples of when each tool would be used, how to call it, and better argument descriptions.

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#14

Post by kwcto »

jhurliman wrote: post #13
jphorism wrote: post #12

Awesome stuff. Seems to me like one great use case of an MCP for Ableton would be to develop muscle / workflow memory for music production workflows. Adjacently, I've started using Perplexity a bunch for this sort of thing because it indexes YouTube tutorial transcripts. Any thoughts on how to design MCPs for learning Ableton better?

One thing I don’t cover in the blog post is ensuring your MCP tool calls are well documented. (If it’s an existing MCP you can do this with a README or instructions file.) I saw a jump in efficiency when I manually edited the docstrings with examples of when each tool would be used, how to call it, and better argument descriptions.

Would be forever grateful for a repo to learn from, even if its rough.

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#15

Post by jphorism »

jhurliman wrote: post #13
jphorism wrote: post #12

Awesome stuff. Seems to me like one great use case of an MCP for Ableton would be to develop muscle / workflow memory for music production workflows. Adjacently, I've started using Perplexity a bunch for this sort of thing because it indexes YouTube tutorial transcripts. Any thoughts on how to design MCPs for learning Ableton better?

One thing I don’t cover in the blog post is ensuring your MCP tool calls are well documented. (If it’s an existing MCP you can do this with a README or instructions file.) I saw a jump in efficiency when I manually edited the docstrings with examples of when each tool would be used, how to call it, and better argument descriptions.

That's cool! Have you thought about some docstring augmentation loop -- either by having the agent log the tool uses or by auto querying (e.g. perplexity API) for example use cases in the wild?

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#17

Post by krfantasy »

ano-ther wrote: post #6

Excellent! I tried to use Claude on the Ableton file format about a year ago and it left me quite frustrated -- but now I have a new reason to look at this again. Generally, it would be nice of Ableton to release an official documentation of their API.

I've been vibe-coding a diff tool[1] for Ableton Live project files in my spare time, though the project is still far from complete. It's meant to generate human-readable, meaningful summary text that shows the differences between two versions of a project file (.als). With this diff tool, I can then use Git to properly version-control Ableton Live project files.

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

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#18

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

krfantasy wrote: post #17
ano-ther wrote: post #6

Excellent! I tried to use Claude on the Ableton file format about a year ago and it left me quite frustrated -- but now I have a new reason to look at this again. Generally, it would be nice of Ableton to release an official documentation of their API.

I've been vibe-coding a diff tool[1] for Ableton Live project files in my spare time, though the project is still far from complete. It's meant to generate human-readable, meaningful summary text that shows the differences between two versions of a project file (.als). With this diff tool, I can then use Git to properly version-control Ableton Live project files. So far I've completed roughly 70% of the Ableton Live…

Thankfully session view is for crazy people that can be ignored :)

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#20

Post by jhurliman »

kwcto wrote: post #14
jhurliman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I don’t cover in the blog post is ensuring your MCP tool calls are well documented. (If it’s an existing MCP you can do this with a README or instructions file.) I saw a jump in efficiency when I manually edited the docstrings with examples of when each tool would be used, how to call it, and better argument descriptions.

Would be forever grateful for a repo to learn from, even if its rough.

https://github.com/jhurliman/ableton-mcp/pull/1
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