Ableton Live

Ableton Live, also known as Live or sometimes colloquially as "Ableton", is a digital audio workstation for macOS and Windows developed by the German company Ableton. In contrast to many other software sequencers, Live is designed to be an instrument for live performances as well as a tool for composing, recording, arranging, mixing, and mastering. It is also used by DJs, as it offers a suite of controls for beatmatching, crossfading, and other different effects used by turntablists, and was one of the first music applications to automatically beatmatch songs. Live is available directly from Ableton in three editions: Intro (with limited key features), Standard, and Suite (with the most features). Suite includes Max for Live functionality, made possible in partnership with Cycling '74. Ableton has also made a fourth version of Live, Lite, with similar limitations to Intro, which is only available bundled with a range of music production hardware, including MIDI controllers and audio interfaces. Live was created by Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf in the mid-1990s. Henke left Ableton in 2016 to concentrate on his artistic project Monolake. Behles and Henke met while studying programming at the Technical University of Berlin, and wrote software in the music programming language Max to perform techno as their band Monolake. Henke and Behles identified a need in Berlin's electronic music scene for user-friendly software for live performances, and worked with local acts to develop it. Though Live was not developed in Max, Max was used to prototype most of its features. Henke said later of Live's creation, "I think the feeling we had was [that] there was enough like-minded people in our closer community who could appreciate a product like this, and that it could work commercially. That gave us confidence to believe that a small company could actually survive on the market." He said one of the first industry figures to recognise Live's potential was the Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, who was impressed by Live's ability to change the tempo of a loop without altering its pitch.