A couple of times I've tried somewhat seriously to build "google docs for ableton" (meaning two people editing the same project on different computers, seeing each other's edits in realtime). Frustratingly I decided it was impossible to do a really good job of it back then. This sounds like it might finally make it doable!
In the past, I've literally done screen-sharing for this, one "instructor" and one "pilot", basically like how you do remote pair programming typically, but with Ableton instead.
Ha yeah I have considered the same. There’s not enough info exposed via the Python or Max APIs (or indeed this one) to sync all the state you’d care about so I think the only option would be syncing the actual als files (which are zipped XML) which means you’d only be able to sync at save points
We should talk - I’m building a Claude Code plugin for music composition and analysis, which currently integrates with Ableton using MCP and Ableton control surface (basically LOM) and an M4L patch. But it could easily work with any DAW that has the right primitives.
But the MCP server isn’t the interesting part. It’s the round trip of composition and mixing. “Set up a calypso beat and baseline; add distortion to the bass; set up filters to protect the kick from the bass”
That's a very personal thing. A lot of musicians are extremely, extremely resistant to using LLMs to assist with composition. Obviously, too, some are not.
For sure. I'm just making a circular saw because I see value. If someone else wants to stick to hand tools, no complaints.
Note that "assist with composition" covers a lot of ground. There's Suno, and there's "let's experiment with chords changes to get from F Phrygian to C major"
It's nice to see peoples' success stories with diagnoses. I've been suffering from something for more than 20 years now. I was healthy until 2005. Then it seemed like I got sick with some kind of virus and just... never got better. I have unpredictable good stretches and bad stretches. During my bad stretches I can't get out of bed. I've mostly given up on the idea of a diagnosis myself, after seeing dozens of doctors over the years, with the most positive interactions being Stanford researchers telling me I'm a really "interesting" case.
A question I enjoy asking myself when I'm wondering about this stuff is "if there are alien mathematicians in a distant galaxy somewhere, do they know about this?"
For complex numbers my gut feeling is yes, they do.
This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.
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