It’s only fair to say that Ableton’s Link technology has been a big deal from day one. It’s been taken up by a huge number of apps in the iOS world, on Android, macOS, and even in hardware too. I’d go as far as to say that Link is now a hygiene factor for any new app. You just have to have it.
Of course, one thing that it’s been missing is the ability to manage start and stop commands. That is, up until now. With the latest version of Link comes exactly that. Start and stop built right in, and as of today Audiobus has added support for Ableton Link Start/Stop Sync, so when Start/Stop Sync is enabled, Audiobus will forward start and stop messages from Link to apps connected to it.
So Link just makes itself even more important and indispensable.
If you don’t have Ableton Link in your app as yet then you might want to consider adding it. Developers can find documentation here. The site gives more details about v3 start/stop:
“As of Version 3, Link allows peers to share information on the user’s intent to start or stop transport with other peers that have the feature enabled. Start/stop state changes only follow user actions. This means applications will not adapt to, or automatically change the start/stop state of a Link session when they are joining. After a peer joins a session it exposes and listens to all upcoming start/stop state changes. This is different to tempo, beat, and phase that are automatically aligned as soon as an application joins a session. As every application handles start and stop commands according to its capabilities and quantization, it is not expected that applications start or stop at the same time. Rather every application should start according to its quantum and phase.”
Personally I’m really glad to see Audiobus get this update straight away. It makes Audiobus even more useful again.