MID continues to make cool stuff for Ableton Live, with a special emphasis on Ableton Move. Ever wished you could quickly chop up a track or other longer material into bar-aligned loops — especially for easy triggering on Move? Move Loop Slicer does just that, and it’s free now.
Ableton Extensions are all about freeing yourself from that tedious work and spending your energy on playing, so here we go.
Here’s the idea: you’ve got some longer material, and you want to use the Move pads to quickly trigger a few bars at a time. It could be a live or hybrid set, or some backing materials.
Now, typically that would involve importing the audio, then making sure the tempo is set correctly, then making sure warp markers are in place, then slicing the audio, going through and preparing separate loops, and then exporting all of that to your session file or Ableton Move. Uff.
Thanks to some clever open-source libraries, Move Slicer automates the process. It automatically finds tempo, beat grid, and even where sections and breaks are situated. And it automatically places the loop grid right on the first transient.
Really, this is a glimpse of how automatic warping could work throughout Ableton Live. But for now, it’s already a timesaver for a lot of use cases, especially if you’re mixing in some DJ-style techniques with your live performance.
All of those loops are ready to go and identified, with controls to easily nudge the settings and divisions around as you need. When you’re happy, you can export. Target Live (and Push and other controllers) by slicing to a Session — color-coding the results on a track.
Or if you’re an Ableton Move lover (as the name not-so-subtly hints at), you can export into a timestamped folder of WAVs, ready to drop on the Move. That makes the whole analyze-tweak-export-go workflow for the mobile Move a matter of moments.
This is in progress, but available free — and worth a download for Live users, too, even if you don’t have Move:
It’s an Extension, so it does require the latest public beta for Live (12.4.5 and later). See the guide to that launch, plus some other early favorites, though that already requires an update as more are showing up regularly.
The magic under the hood: “tempo, beat, and structure analysis use librosa (ISC) via librosa.cpp, compiled to WebAssembly. FFT backend: pffft; matrix math: Eigen (MPL-2.0).”
While you’re there, there are a couple of other beta experiments running, each with “streamlined” UIs. KIK is a kick synth with sub; DLY is a delay with modulation and feedback. They each can take on a very NERK-y character, especially at extremes, true to their creator. (That EP link is brutal and overlooked.)
MID is the creation of Benjamin Weiss, aka Nerk, producer and veteran of NI and Ableton. You’ll also find a bunch of uniquely tailored soundpacks for Move (and other gear), including collaboration with Dr. Walker — reuniting two underground techno legends who are also notorious for having produced legendary mods of the XBase 09. (See the Toktok and Dr. Walker editions, respectively. iykyk.)