Ableton Live is adding audio streaming for real-time musical collaboration

Ableton is rolling out the Live 12.4 Beta with a number of new features, but the headliner is Link Audio, which enables real-time collaboration between devices on a local network. Having to be on the same network is a serious limitation and, as the name implies, Link Audio only supports streaming audio. That means your buddy can’t tweak MIDI or take over automation in your Live session from another device. But it does streamline cross-device collaboration, which normally requires exporting projects and sending them back and forth.

Link Audio builds on the existing Ableton Link, which allows you to sync BPM over a local network. Link has broad support from hardware and software developers, including Akai’s MPC line and competitors like Logic Pro. Link Audio has much more limited support at the moment, only working with Ableton Live and Ableton’s Note app, along with the company’s Push and Move devices. Beta versions of the public SDK are available, and Link Audio will have third-party support. Though it remains to be seen how widely adopted it will be.

Link Audio-enabled devices will show up as available inputs in Live and on the Push Standalone, allowing you to monitor or record them. Audio can be either sent or received from Live and Push, but Move and the Note mobile app only support sending audio. That means your friend can sketch out a melody in Note on their iPhone, and you can pull it into Live on your laptop, but not the reverse.

Ableton recommends using a wired connection whenever possible, but Link Audio will work over Wi-Fi. Latency and dropouts might be an issue, however, so I wouldn’t rely on Wi-Fi beyond the demo stage.

Live 12.4 will also include improvements to the stem separation feature introduced in 12.3 just a couple of months ago. They’re mostly workflow and quality of life improvements, like the ability to separate only a selection of audio from arrangement view, rather than an entire track. Stems can also be merged into a single track, so if you want to keep the bass and drums together, you have the option to do that.

The other big upgrades are coming to the Note iOS app and the Move groovebox. Both are getting two new effects. Erosion is a sort of signal degradation effect that straddles the line between distortion and bitcusher. They’re both also adding Auto Shift, Ableton’s answer to Auto Tune, which will be great for those of us who can’t sing but still want to lay down vocal tracks on their musical sketches.

Lastly, Note and Move are also adding support for audio tracks. Until now, the lack of proper audio looping has been a major limitation of Ableton’s two “sketchpad” offerings. While you could sample into them and loop audio using workarounds, there wasn’t proper audio clip support as you’d find in Ableton Live.
Ableton Live 12.4 will be available as a free upgrade to Live 12 users. And, if you have a license, you can sign up for the public beta here.

Update February 12th: Confirmation of third-party support for Link Audio has been added.