New tools for building songs and stitching them into a single Ableton session

Tech Talk
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Hey everyone!

Leo kindly said it was OK to share this here. I’ve been running tracks in Ableton with AbleSet for a long time now, mostly leading worship at a few churches around the Dallas area, and it’s become the backbone of my whole rig. I built these two MacOS apps to make my life easier and save a bit of time and headache when building everything.

**BuildAble 12** takes a MultiTracks download, or just a plain folder of stems, and gives you back a finished Live 12 session with everything you want in there. It can copy over an AbleSet folder as well. Click, spoken guide cues, section locators, lyrics for the big screen display, every stem named and routed, and an OSC command that fires when the song starts. There’s a timeline editor where you lay out sections and cues by ear while the stems play.

Site: BuildAble 12 · turn a MultiTracks download into a finished Ableton session

**StitchAble** takes those finished songs and merges them into one gapless set. Running order, key changes, tempo and meter maps, markers, one click and one guide, and every song’s returns reconciled onto the outputs you need. You can also overlap songs by a set number of bars and audition any seam before you build it. And just like the other one, your AbleSet config comes along from a template you set up once.

Site: StitchAble · merge your Ableton songs into one gapless setlist

Hopefully this helps someone out, it’s already made my life easier. Either app works perfectly fine on its own.

Also, just being upfront: they’re $50 and $70 each, one time for 5 activations. BuildAble builds for Live 12, StitchAble outputs for Live 11 or 12.

I’m still adding features as I think of them, so feedback is very much appreciated. Right now I’m looking at a song library editor for BuildAble, and a live mode for StitchAble that works similarly to how MultiTracks playback lets you add and remove sections on the fly.

They’re both at https://music.danspace.app if you want a look.

Happy to answer anything, and honestly just as happy to hear what’s missing. Most of what’s in there came from things that I feel would make my life easier.

3 Likes
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WELLL now I’m keen haha

Will definitely be looking at buying these!! :smiley:

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Funny how there’s a need for this. I had coded a similar set of apps for our own church as well, but it’s very workflow specific and not fit for distribution.

Interested to see how you implemented it. I had to reverse engineer the Ableton .als file format to get the system working.

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Yeah, mostly the same story here. I play at a few churches and kept running into this exact need, which is where the idea came from. There were a couple of options out there already but they were all subscription based, web based, and needed an internet connection, which some of the churches didn’t have very reliably. So I built these to run fully offline with everything needed already built into the session. Once everything was built, a few friends mentioned I should make it available so others could use it too.

And same for me on the file format. .als is basically just XML, so a lot of the early work was unzipping sessions I’d built by hand in the past and figuring out exactly what Live actually cares about vs. what it can regenerate on its own. Happy to compare notes if you ever want to!

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Wow I’m super impressed with your implementation of a Trackbuilder that actually takes into account AbleSet workflows! I saw both your videos, I’m no expert in programming whatsoever, but what do you think about an import PDF file button for lyrics that takes the copy paste out of your lyric / chord building process? Might prove useful! Great Job with the ease of access looks, very user friendly. Also the channel routing page looks crisp!!

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Thank you, that means a lot! And good timing honestly, I was already trying to make that work for my own workflow.

There’s an Import button at the bottom of the track list now. Direct it at a chart PDF or paste the text, and it pulls the words and chords out. MultiTracks Chart Pro is the best path if that’s what you use, in letters, Nashville numbers, Roman numerals, or solfege. It also reads SongSelect charts and plain text charts. A review window opens first so you can fix anything before it touches the song.

On a MultiTracks conversion your existing sections win, so the chart only supplies words and chords and can’t rearrange the song. And if the chart has Chart Pro’s performance cues beside each section, you can have those drop into the section notes too.

Both apps have a free trial now if you want to put your own charts through it and see how it handles them.

Appreciate you saying something either way. If you try them out, let me know if anything acts strange. I’d genuinely like to hear about it so I can fix it.

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hey, i sent u a email :slightly_smiling_face:

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