This is a pain point for me as well, but I'm not sure what solving this would truly look like. At the moment whenever I'm collaborating with anyone else, one of us will have the "primary" project file containing the entire mix/session, and the collaborator will be sent all stems individually, and they'll send their stems back for ingest in to the main project. It's pretty clunky, but it prevents the awkward "I don't have that plugin/VST/etc" issues that passing project files has.

I dream of a git-like workflow for Ableton, ideally with some sort of clever solve for the inevitable missing device issue (maybe freezing could solve this with some tweaks?).

I'm also curious to hear from others on how they solve this, especially when collaborating remotely.

This is very solvable in theory, we've been doing package management and version control in software for decades. I'm not familiar with the plugin/VST ecosystem enough but I'm assuming there's no real central registry ala pypi/maven/npm?

> I'm assuming there's no real central registry ala pypi/maven/npm?

that's exactly right, unfortunately. it's a bit of the wild-west the it comes to plugins/VSTs in terms of distribution.

and I agree, this feels like the sort of thing that should be pretty solvable, but I think there's a lot of hidden complexity in this problem space. Solving the "version control" aspect of this feels like it should be rather straightforward for a single user, involving multiple users with different Ableton Live versions, different plugins/VSTs (and different versions within those) is where things would undoubtedly get messy.

I do think there is a niche market for this sort of thing, however.

Many of the producers of the plugins are against a central repository for reasons you can guess; licensing and revenue generation. One annoying part of working with various plugins is the companies tend to have gatekeeper applications the user needs to interact with to get plugins authorized and installed on their system.

You will find applications like this one, https://www.pluginhubapp.com, show up frequently to try and manage this complexity. I am in no way at all recommending this application, but it is an example. This application does ship with all of its python code in the app under (possibly a mistake) so you can see the hoops they have to jump through to try and make their system work.

Not sure package management is the right solution for this. Maybe a lightweight execution sandbox environment for remote / guest machines? Another big challenge is the size of some plugins and their libraries--i.e. sample based plugins (Kontakt libraries, for instance) can be in the 10s to 100s of gigabytes.

version control for it hmmmmmmmm

What would you envision?

An easy way to share a project with collaborators. This is obviously hard because of the gazillion VSTs and multiple platforms that Live supports, but if I could just share the bare bones project (channels, tempo, and all built-in plugins that all Live users have) it would already be an improvement over the current situation.

In terms of workflow I can imagine a "shared project" view in Live that loads the shared bare bones project file and allows you to easily lay your own tracks on top (with whatever VSTs you have installed locally), and then allows you to freeze and share those recordings as audio in one go, in the shared project.

Question: what happens when you share a project made on a Mac version of Ableton with a windows user? All of the internal pathing in Project.xls will be macOS paths. It's not as simple as sharing a bare-bones project. Bounce stems.

I have worked on the code of legacy applications like MasterTracks Pro, Studio Vison and SAW and my opinion would be that you need to start from the ground up with collaboration as the guiding light. The existing applications have workflows and data models that are very monolithic and tied into the concept of a single user, using a single application with application logic and workflows implemented in code. That code sometime exposes functionality through scripting dictionaries or plugin APIs, but the this is backward in my opinion.

Other commenters have stated what a pain it is to just get two environments in sync. A complex production will have tons of plugins, various MIDI and audio interfaces, differing outboard gear and other variables that make life hard when sharing files.

You also have asset management issues; where are the audio stems, vocal tracks, library resources, etc. stored and how are they shared.

If you want to collaborate in real-time, then there is another layer of technical challenges.

I have been working on a system that is influenced from my earlier experience building audio tools for earlier generations of sequencers and DAWs, rendering pipelines for Dreamworks and configuration management systems for Amazon. I feel you really need a system that uses a DSL and all operations are defined at that level. There shouldn't be anything you can do in the user interface that isn't available at the DSL level. You can then think about techniques used in Docker, k8s, etc. to define and deploy both the environment and the interpretation of the DSL in the user interface.

Wow, SAW… there’s a name from the past.

Wasn’t that the one written in assembler? Kudos!

Yes. It helped to basically write your own operating system to work around kernel issues. Not really recommended though...

Amazingly, the website is still alive: https://www.sawstudio.com/products_sawstudio.htm I am not brave enough to download and try it out.

This is the recurrent pain point I have and see my friends have with Live. An exported project always has something missing/blocking.

The procedure to ensure your project is properly fully exported should be one button in a single place, not a 4 steps checklist in different configuration views.

Have you tried to collect tracks before sharing the project?

I rememeber trying blend.io and Splice studio back in the day, but they weren't too ergonomic due to lack of a 'project package' convention. There also was an inkling of native sharing for a while [0]:

> Officially, it was known as "Ableton Link Share" during early development and then launched as “Ableton Live’s ‘Share’ feature” — introduced around Live 9.1 (2013–2015 era).

> It allowed users to upload their Live Sets directly from Ableton Live to a personal web page (via ableton.com) to share projects with others — including audio previews and downloadable Live Sets.

> Ableton eventually discontinued the Share feature in 2017, citing limited use and the shift in focus toward Ableton Cloud / Splice / Link integration as alternative collaboration tools.

[0]: https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=252909

It seems to me that the super customizable, plug-in heavy architecture of modern DAWs.. especially Ableton makes collaboration almost impossible, at least without a change in IP/licensing model.

Right. How often are you collaborating with users who agree to only use vanilla Ableton plugins? Every time I've collaborated we have to start the conversation with what plugins we share, which ones are freely available, which ones would are not cost prohibitive for the other side to acquire, and so on.

That said, I think that vanilla Ableton provides a whole lot to collaborate with. Maybe there are a lot of people for whom the base set works, but "do you have Apollo UAD + the Neve preamp plugin?" or something like it is not a rare occurrence.

Why aren't you bouncing stems? You bounce the stems, they load them into their DAW, make edits with whatever tools they want, then bounce them out again. There's no need to transfer around whole projects...

yep this is what I do, though I haven't collaborated in a bit. it really is the best workflow at this point and it can be as granular as you need/want it to be.

True, but this is how we used to do it in the old days, when track limitations forced us to bounce with all the outboard effects baked into the track. Producers might not physically ride the faders anymore, but a lot of them are very reluctant to even track vocals through compression onto disk. They want to keep everything available for processing later on.

Now, is this a good idea? There is a lot to be said about having an upfront plan about the usage of effects and placement of parts on the soundstage and committing. This might be a lost art, as I keep seeing Pro Tools files with hundreds of tracks, with stacks and stacks of effects.

I mean, as an older fart, I do think there's value in committing to an idea. Though, I could also see benefit in having the processing be malleable until the last possible second. I mean, imagine if you're working with an egomaniac artist who keeps being wishy-washy on which sound they like best. If the effects are being printed and they want to go back, it could become a huge pain in the ass. AT THE SAME TIME, I think there's merit in telling someone 'no' so the project can move forward. I dunno, I guess it depends. I can see it both ways.

Freezing/bouncing also lets you have more determinism.

Plugins with (often intentional) indeterminism in them, variations in OS and CPU architecture, variations in how fast their CPU is (a billion plugins on a track may run smoothly for one person and destroy someone else's machine), variations in sample rate, etc. can subtly or substantially affect how something sounds.

And in general it just makes things way easier to share even ignoring the issues of getting people to install the same plugin at the same version and the IP issues.

This. It’s the canonical way to collaborate with audio. I even ”collab” with myself because loading old projects is fragile in general. Always has been.

[delayed]

I meant to reply to you here but managed to post a comment of my own

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50441616

There is a this live collaboration project: https://api-production-006c.up.railway.app/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/1xrbj82/been_an_ab...

> mainly it uses the underlying control surface layer to receive events with a python bridge then communicates those out to a central server, from there there's a websocket room you have to be invited to and you get all the updates.

> For changes or additions of samples/tracks it sends it to an incoming temp directory and edit's the ALS to read from it instantly

> The git portion is heavily inspired by git lfs, and stores your data in r2's but only diff's between the last version and current version.

It's a hosted product, but self hosting is possible even now. I think the code is up on github.

>Still no built-in way to collaborate with other musicians, it seems..

Asynchronous collaboration, there are a few non-native solutions.

Or you can always exchange files via Dropbox or something as you said. Or share screen.

Live playing over the public internet, there's no good way to do it , and can't really be due to latency. Many projects tried, all suck.

Live playing locally, there's Ableton Link.

This is a huge update (ARA alone, the step sequencer, etc) anyway, and many long awaited and several non expected items.

I always thought they'd eventually implement some sort of version control, ideally git based, or a timeline similar to Fusion360.

> timeline similar to Fusion360

I was about to post exactly this. I don't even (personally) need collaboration, I just want to be able to branch, experiment, and merge. Even if we didn't get true version control, Fusion-style timelines would be such a huge improvement.

I know next to nothing about Ableton but aren't projects mostly a bunch of uncompressed audio or other large binary media files? Git doesn't really do well with that.

this is a DAW, so it generates most of the music, as opposed to audio editors (Sound Forge, Audacity) which operate like you say.

Vast majority of musicians use DAW, although some famously don't, e.g. Burial used Sound Forge for his first album.

[delayed]

> Any Ableton Live users here that can chime in on how they solve that?

I'm guessing you mean remote collaborations, but you don't actually mention that explicitly :D

Hot-seating works well for collaborations for me :) I've basically setup my home-studio to make it easy to "add in" more folks on a moments notice, with chairs and what not available when needed, and table space for when we do electronic jams with synths and whatever. Sometimes someone knows Ableton better than me, then I let them control everything, or vice-versa.

Folks around you (even complete strangers!) are surprisingly receptive to quick Instagram DMs with "Wanna jam at my home studio? :)" in them, and since music is what I do to get away a bit from the computer, forcing it to not ever be remote worked well for me to make it remain a more-or-less computer-less experience :)

I've used this service in the past:

https://audiomovers.com/products/listento

if you're open to trying another DAW or exporting stems into one, https://audiotool.com is a full-featured browser DAW that can be used to produce professional-grade music.

It uses WebAssembly to bring performance on par with desktop DAWs, while being fully built around real-time collaboration. It even supports VST3

many great community features there too

I was trying to build a version control system at one point. Basically an Ableton project is actually just a massive XML file that you could dump into a repo. I was trying to think of what a "git like" abstraction would work on top of it, but one of the challenges or problems I imagined would be all the VSTs/plugins and compatibility across units. In theory, the actual idea of freezing your XML and pushing to a git repo isn't so bad; it's similar to what Zepplin did with sketch ages ago, the fear was always - what happens when "figma" comes along and kills it but I didn't invest too much time into it.

The other challenge is media file management. Specifically, multiple MB & GB of media file storage means $$$ and git was magical because of free hosting. Then there was clip splicing and diffs - a wav file isn't exactly like a piece of code you can read directly and I don't have enough knowledge of the internals to make it work.

I was also worried Ableton would just take the idea and integrate it anyway and then it would be a wasted effort me

I asked claude to 1 shot it and this is what it made: https://github.com/aquaflamingo/ableton-stem-vcs

Years ago there was a startup called Splice here in NYC where the original product was basically just that -- version control and collaboration for Ableton (and maybe other DAWs?). I remember having an interview at Union Square Ventures for a role there and a couple of the partners asked me about them as they were an investment, and I really couldn't see a viable business in it the same way GitHub was for git. I brought up the storage costs as well.

I just looked them up and it seems like they're still around and pivoted to a learning DAW and a plugin marketplace.

I was working on exactly the same idea - mobile app to record stems, cloud-based projects - and I remember the sinking feeling when I read the TechCrunch article covering Splice's launch.

Surprised that 10 years later on there's still no industry juggernaut owning collab music production.

Parsec can be workable, the two issues I ran into were that your audio setup might not like it and you might have to use a virtual device/switch off of ASIO or similar for a screen share. The other was that drawing automation curves could be a little awkward on a client box.

I think with something like syncthing + taking turns as host if automation still has issues and a virtual output you can probably get a good flow going, even if not perfect.

We did it for years with an owncloud instance, with a friend. It’s a PITA but kinda works.

Endlesss [1 , 3] plus Ableton Link [2]

There will be some session setup and configuration for abelton and endlesss as far as i/o is concerned… but once its running you can play with anyone anywhere in the world. Endlesss handles the ip, streaming, and discovery and link will make sure its all synced up… Is the most elegant solution I’ve found by far.

[1] https://endlesss.fm/ [2] https://www.ableton.com/en/link/ [3] https://endlesss.net/