Ableton Live Tools is a small Python toolkit for reading Ableton Live .als session files and turning useful arrangement data into practical exports for DJs, producers, editors, archivists, and automation workflows. It focuses on things Ableton users often need outside Live itself: locator tracklists, tempo-aware timeline data, Mixcloud-compatible tracklists, Adobe Audition marker files, WebVTT chapters, CUE sheets, Markdown reports, MIDI locator markers, JSON exports, and fixture-backed validation workflows.

The scripts are standard-library Python and are designed to be easy to run from a terminal, CI job, or batch-processing workflow. They are optimized for high-performance parsing, low memory use, and low-friction command-line use on large Ableton Live sets.

Points Of Interest

• Extract Ableton Live arrangement locators from .als files with accurate timing across tempo changes, tempo ramps, offsets, and moved/pre-roll starts.
• Export locator data to TSV, CSV, JSON, Mixcloud text, Adobe Audition marker files, WebVTT chapters, CUE sheets, Markdown reports, and Standard MIDI marker files.
• Generate precise Ableton Live timeline data for tempo events, tempo ramps, time signatures, detected keys, locators, clip boundaries, song end, and optional bar/beat grids.
• Include metadata such as BPM, bar/beat position, time signature, absolute seconds, normalized seconds, Ableton locator IDs, and sequential track numbers.
• Validate changes against canonical Ableton Live fixture files and benchmark performance against another git ref.

Tools Collection

• Extract Locators: src/extract_locators.py extracts Ableton Live arrangement locators from .als session files and writes timestamped tracklists. It supports tempo changes, linear tempo ramps, offsets, TSV exports, CSV exports, Mixcloud exports, Adobe Audition marker exports, WebVTT chapter exports, CUE sheet exports, Markdown reports, Standard MIDI marker exports, JSON exports, optional key stripping, configurable TSV/CSV heading rows, and optional locator metadata columns.

• Extract Timeline: src/extract_timeline.py extracts a precise Ableton Live arrangement timeline from .als session files. It writes an interleaved event stream for tempo, tempo ramps, time signatures, detected keys, locators, clip boundaries, song end, and optional generated bar/beat grid rows, with real wall-clock time and sample indexes when a sample rate is available.

Project Notes

• Performance and Output Roadmap: Tracks profiling results, optimization candidates, validation notes, and candidate export formats for future releases.

Testing

• Tests: Run python3 -m unittest discover -s tests from the repository root to validate the CLI tools against the canonical Ableton Live fixture set.
• Validation Benchmark: Run python3 scripts/benchmark_validation.py --compare-ref=main to measure current CLI performance against another git ref.

License

Please read LICENSE for the terms of use.