Hi, I have shows coming up and Ableset 3 has been running smoothly except I’m running into a major workflow issue where I use loops to transition to the next song. In Performance view on my iPad, I used to be able to have the back arrow, play/pause, loop, and forward arrow all four in a view at once. Now it will only populate to 3 controls at the bottom. Back, Play/Pause, Forward as far as I can tell.
This causes an issue for me where if it catches a loop, it replaces “next song” with the loop icon. My show relies on me being able to hit next while a loop is engaged, and I can only disengage before going to the next song as far as I can tell. I thought I could fix this in settings but checking the loop button in settings instead replaces “next song” entirely. I notice this is not the case however for record button. I unfortunately don’t have time to make a canvas from scratch. Am I missing something or is this a bug perhaps. Any help would be appreciated!! Thanks.
Yes, this is currently intended behavior.
If you enable the Loop button to be visible in Performance View, it will take the place of the Next Song button at the bottom.
That said, I completely understand the workflow you’re aiming for, and we’ll definitely keep your feedback in mind.
For this kind of custom control setup, Canvas is the way to go.
Hi, thanks for the reply. I’m having the same issue, which is how I came across this post.
Canvas is great, but I’m wondering if it has a feature for jumping between song sections? For example, in Performance Mode, the song sections (locators) are displayed and you can easily jump between them. Being able to cue the band back on track using quantized launching in Ableton is sometimes a lifesaver, and it’s also super handy during rehearsals. It would be amazing to have that on my Canvas screen—that’s really my only issue with it right now.
Also, the reason I wish we could have the four transport buttons back is that I use looping a lot during live shows to give singers time to talk over the intro/outro. Additionally, I rely on the Forward button for a quicker workflow during rehearsals and soundchecks.
I really hope the team will consider bringing the four buttons back.
Thank you guys so much for this app, Loving it !!!
@leolabs actually shared a ready-made canvas that could work for your use case. It displays the current song’s sections as buttons, reflects their names and colors, highlights the active one, and tapping a button does a quantized jump. You can download it from this forum post. Grab the Section Jump.json file and drop it into your AbleSet/Canvases folder. From there you can use it as-is or customize it however you want.
2. Transport buttons (Play, Stop, Loop, Forward)
You can rebuild all of these on your Canvas using Button elements that send OSC commands. Add a Button for each one and set the OSC command to:
Play → /global/play
Stop → /global/stop
Loop toggle → /loop/enabled toggle (or /loop/escape to exit a loop cleanly)
Forward / next section → /setlist/jumpBySections 1
Back / previous section → /setlist/jumpBySections -1
If you want “forward by bars/beats” instead (useful for soundcheck-style quick navigation), you can use /setlist/jumpByBars 1 or /setlist/jumpByBeats 1.
You can style them however you want — icons, colors, sizes — and place them exactly where you had them before. Full OSC reference is here if you want to explore more commands.