Ableton Live 12 Standard

Ableton Live is fast, smooth and flexible DAW software for music creation and live performance. It includes effects, instruments, sounds, and a variety of creative features - everything you need to create any kind of music.

Live 12 comes in three versions: Intro, Standard and Suite. They share common features, but Standard and Suite have additional features, tools, effects, and sound libraries. For a complete version comparison, visit the manufacturer's website.

Record sketches, edit and experiment
Create in a traditional linear arrangement or improvise without timeline constraints in Live's Session View. Move freely between musical elements and play with ideas without stopping the music or interrupting its flow. Combine musical ideas freely in Live's Session View without timeline restrictions. Recording ideas is lightning fast and it's the perfect place to improvise. You can play MIDI and audio loops of different lengths in any combination without ever stopping the music.

Get into the details
In the Arrangement view, you can arrange your music by timeline. You can record multiple passes of an audio or MIDI performance in single takes. Find the best parts of each and join them together for the desired end result. Develop the initial idea or rearrange the parts to create the right musical flow for the song. You can also easily upload everything you do in Session View to Arrangement to improvise on the way to the finished song.

Bring your ideas to Live
Whatever form your inspiration takes, DAW Live gives you the means to use it. Record hardware synths, software plug-ins, drum machines, guitars, or any real-world sound. Now you can use the Capture MIDI feature to record notes after you've played them, turning your most spontaneous ideas into music. There are also sound-to-MIDI conversion features that let you turn drum breaks and parts of a melody or harmony into MIDI patterning that you can edit and reuse with your own sounds.

Use any sounds at any tempo
One of the things that makes creating in Live so seamless is the ability to change the tempo and timing of any sound in real time without stopping the music. This feature is called warping. With warping, you can mix and match loops of different tempos, correct timing errors in recorded performances, or radically reshape any sound into new sound design directions.

Create your own sound with Live tools
Native tools, including wavelength synthesis, or FM and physical modeling, are also at the heart of sound creation in Live. Flexible synthesis architectures with intuitive interfaces make deep programming accessible. With Live's pair of sampling tools, get more out of your samples with built-in slicing and warping capabilities, multi-sample playback, and more.

Effects for shaping ideas, designing sounds and finishing music
The Live app includes the gear you need to create ideas and shape sounds. Use the Live app's MIDI effects to creatively manipulate your songs. Or use Live's sound effects to achieve the sound you're looking for - clean up your mix with precision tools or make a creative mess with analog-modeled noise, distortion, and saturation.

Sound selection
Sounds to create any music you want are included with Live. The Core Library, included with all editions of Live, contains a rich collection of vintage synthesizers, analog drum machines, multisample percussion, electric pianos, and other acoustic instruments. In addition, there are Curated Collections, sets of instruments with selected sounds from selected scenes - instrument racks, clips and samples - that are designed to be shaped and molded into something new.

A hub for your live performances
Use Live to turn your ideas into live performances. Control external hardware, integrate external effects or mixing consoles. Improvise on your own, resample sounds in real time or process audio played by others. If you're playing with multiple music apps, Link technology can keep multiple devices in perfect time over the same network.

Make every show unique
One of the things that makes the Live system so ideal for live performances is its flexibility. You can design your own unique combinations of instruments and effects and control any number of parameters using up to 16 macro potentiometers. Find the settings you like and save them as Macro Snapshots for instant recall. On stage, you can trigger, resequence and remix your music in real time. And with flexible MIDI mapping, you can set up almost any part of Live for convenient controller tuning.

Tempo tracking
Live listens and adjusts tempo based on incoming audio in real time, so it becomes a dynamic part of the band, not a tempo source that everyone has to follow. When DJing, you can even turn Live into a tempo-synced FX box.

Connect with the outside world
Max for Live is the software platform that powers Live's range of instruments and effects. You can use it to make a range of customizations and even change the way Live works, or open up a whole new world of possibilities and connect to lights, cameras, sensors, surround sound setups and more.