Section colors based on titles

Feature Requests
1

Hi Leo,

When I want to create a new song, my process is as follows: I have a template project, and I mark the individual sections using Locators. Along these marks, I split the long MIDI clip in the existing section track and rename those accordingly. Then comes the guide, etc.

It would be awesome if you could set the colors for the sections in AbleSet based on what the section name is. So whenever I open any project and a section name is “Chorus”, it would always be green (or whatever color I assign to it). This approach might be a bit unique, but I’m curious if you see potential in this idea?

2

Hey @sothi,

Thank you for sharing your idea! I’ll pass it along.

In the meantime, there’s a way to get close to it and cut out some of the double work at the same time.

Put the name and the color in the section clip

Section clips use the same locator notation as locators, so the color can go straight into the clip name:

Chorus [green]
Verse [blue]
Bridge [amber]

No flag needed on the Sections track for this. And since the clip already carries the name, your locators don’t need names at all, you can just leave them as plain position markers.

One thing worth knowing: sections defined by clips can only be jumped to while playback is stopped. To jump to them during playback, Live needs a locator at the section start — but it doesn’t need a name, just > (or >> if you want it as a quick-jump section).

Also, in Settings → Tools you’ll find “Place Locators on Section Clips”, which drops those locators for you automatically. So all the naming and coloring stays in one place, on the clips.

Making it reusable across projects

Since you’re working from a template, you can create one empty MIDI clip per section type — Chorus [green], Verse [blue], etc. — and drag each into your User Library in Live’s browser. Those will be saved as .alc files. Building a new song then becomes dragging “Chorus” from the browser onto your Sections track, name and color included, in any project. I tested this on Live 12 and both the name and the clip color survive the round trip.

If you’d rather use Live’s clip colors, add +CLIPCOLORS (or +CC) to your Sections track name and AbleSet will use the actual clip colors from Live.

Keep in mind that with +CC on, a color attribute in the clip name still wins. So a clip named Chorus [green] shows up green in AbleSet even if the clip itself is blue in Live. The clip color is only used as a fallback when there’s no attribute in the name. That means you can mix both approaches on the same track.

You can see the clip colors and the locator tool in action in the official tutorial.

Would that work for your use case?