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Ableton Live SDK Released! Modders get ready!

Do you use Ableton Live? Have you often wished you could add in that one feature that would make it perfect for your studio or DJing? Now you can with liveapi' s new Ableton Live SDK!

Buy Ableton Live 6 Music Software Here!

There is no doubt about it, Ableton Live is not only here to stay as one of the heavy weight sequencers but it is the tool of choice for more most producers and a lot of new DJ's. It's simplistic nature, it's power and it's flexibility are just some of the reasons why we love and support it. However until recently it's core has been closed which meant that those who loved it couldn't do much in the way of customizing it to their needs.

This is where liveapi.org have come in. They have developed an API built around a chance find hack that shows a lot of promise for hackers and developers to build creative plugins and mods for us to use.

LiveAPI have found two undocumented ways to get access and manipulate the core Ableton Python:

LiveTelnet

Allows you to access the embedded Python environment through a faux Python CLI. Within it you can execute code much as you normally would in a traditional Python CLI although currently history recording / retrieval are not implemented. From this telnet interface you can manipulate the Live API through its methods and attributes. It is currently the best interactive method for accessing API internals.

LiveOSC

Allows you to receive and send UDP OpenSoundControl (OSC) messages. Using OSC.py as the processing mechanism it is possible to run Python code as call-backs to manipulate or query the Ableton Live environment and even send results back to your OSC client.

Because source code is provided for both applications, you may add your own call-backs to suit your needs. Source code has been documented and many examples are provided.

This means that anyone with a good knowledge of Ableton Live and either an understanding of Python or willingness to learn to start moding Ableton Live using their SDK.

How did they do it?

The LiveAPI.org SDK is possible because of the MIDI Remote Scripts. MIDI Remote Scripts are allow vendors and customers to give MIDI controllers the ability to bi-directionally communicate with Live. The currently provided MIDI Remote Scripts for the most part are all available in Python bytecode, but as Rob found the update_display() function is called every 100ms repeatedly. With that knowledge we put together a UDP socket based client/server using OSC that polls for data every 100ms. Later once we understood the 'add*listener' methods, we added a listener to the 'Song.current_song_time' attribute which polls every 60ms. Using these two methods we've been able to reliably poll for data and execute callbacks every 60ms (16 times a second)

For those who want to find out more about Python:

Python is an elegant and powerful programming language. We're big fans, especially Nate who's given up his Perl ways for the Python life. For more information you can read about Python on its very own webpage at http://www.python.org/, or if you're impatient you can dig into the tutorial by its author Guido van Rossum