Ableton Live 13

Re:Ableton Live 13 by vectordust on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @09:24AM (#50440829)

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.

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Re:Ableton Live 13 by PhunkyPhil on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:17AM (#50441596)

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?

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Re:Ableton Live 13 by vectordust on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:23AM (#50441682)

> 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.

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Re:Ableton Live 13 by diskzero on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:36AM (#50441858)

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.

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Re:Ableton Live 13 by theYipster on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @08:58PM (#50448933)

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.

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