Hey guys!
I’d love to be able to run Ablenet to specifically allow for easy resyncing of A & B machines but would still like to maintain independence between A & B machines for transport (pause/play etc.) and moving forward and backward in the set.
It comes down to a workflow preference ultimately, but right now when Ableset is toggled off and back on, you are no longer able to sync playback without restarting Ableset on both A & B machines. This workflow would also work if that behavior was fixed, but it would be ideal to have advanced Ableset settings that were toggle-able in the settings menu to allow independent control of transport and setlists while still keeping sync information available between the two machines.
Is this possible? Or is there a workaround that I could script to get this behavior?
Hey @theinada,
As a built-in setting this isn’t possible right now, as AbleNet is essentially all-or-nothing: when it’s enabled, it keeps both transport (play/pause/stop) and navigation (songs/sections) in sync across hosts. There’s no option to keep only the sync info available while running transport independently.
That said, there’s a hacky workaround you could experiment with:
- Keep AbleNet ON at all times (never toggle it off, that’s what causes the “can’t resync without restarting both” issue you ran into).
- Control transport directly from Ableton Live instead of from AbleSet. Driving Live directly (not through AbleSet) intentionally desyncs the machines, which effectively gives you independent transport per computer while AbleNet stays connected.
- When you want them back together, use Sync Playback Now (Settings → Redundancy, under each host) or its OSC equivalent
/ableNet/syncToRemote.
Important caveat: Sync Playback Now only works when the machine you’re realigning is paused, it’s disabled while Live is already playing. So the resync flow is: pause the machine you want to realign → hit Sync Playback Now → it jumps to the other machine’s position and starts back in sync. It’s not an instant resync while both are playing.
Let me just note that this goes against the usual recommendation (always navigate through AbleSet), so treat it as an experiment rather than a stable workflow. Test it thoroughly before relying on it for a show.
If it helps, you can see the resync workflow in action in the official tutorial.
I’ll pass along the toggle-able behavior you originally described.
Let me know how that behaves on your end!
Thanks for the quick reply! This makes total sense and actually is how I typically test for scenarios where one machine accidentally stops or gets desync’d (controlling Live directly).
The main application for us is to avoid the situation (albeit extremely rare/unlikely) that a pause button is accidentally pressed when Ableset is in focused and playback is stopped across both A&B. We’re going to play around with Safe mode with a toggle and see if that can work for our workflow here!
Again thanks for the quick reply and explanation.