alsd - An Ableton Live set dumping utility

February 10, 2014 6:15 PM

alsd - An Ableton Live set dumping utility
In the course of the recent end-of-year ritual of going through my past year's unfinished Ableton Live projects, I found myself writing a Python script to partially automate the task, by examining the Live sets and dumping information about them (namely, the tracks and the instrument/effect devices in them) as text.

This was made easier by the fact that an Ableton Live set is just a .gzipped XML file, with a fairly unobfuscated schema.

This is the initial version of the script, which lists tracks and devices (including AudioUnit preset names). Future versions will add more functionality, including possibly the extraction of MIDI data, plugin preset data, lists of samples used and such.

Role: programmer

posted by acb (1 comment total)

And now, it can list the clips in a set. There is also code for extracting MIDI notes from those clips, though there is not yet a user-facing command-line option for displaying those (or writing them to a MIDI file).
posted by acb at 4:58 PM on February 11, 2014