Ableton Live

Ableton Live is a digital audio workstation for recording, sequencing, mixing and performing music, developed in Berlin since 1999. It is unusual in pairing a conventional linear Arrangement view with a clip-based Session view built for improvisation and live sets, and that second view is what the product is known for.

It records and edits multitrack audio and MIDI, hosts VST and AU plugins, and has a dedicated comping workflow with take lanes. Chapter 28 of its manual covers scoring to video: QuickTime clips can be trimmed, aligned to the music with Warp Markers acting as hit points, and rendered back out with the finished audio. It runs on both macOS and Windows.

Three editions are sold outright at EUR 79, EUR 279 and EUR 599; Suite alone can be bought through a 24-month rent-to-own plan at EUR 24.96 a month, and education pricing is half price. The one notable absence against other workstations is notation — Live has no score or staff editor, and MIDI editing is piano-roll only.

Ableton AG is a Berlin music-software company founded in 1999, registered at Schönhauser Allee 6-7 with the Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg under HRB 72838. Its licence agreement names the German entity and is governed by German law, with Berlin as the place of performance and exclusive jurisdiction. The agreement carries a separate section applying New York law to copies bought outside Europe — a customer-side carve-out, not a change of contracting entity.

The company is held by Ableton Holding GmbH in Hamburg, whose registered purpose is the management of its participation in Ableton AG and whose managing directors are the founders Gerhard Behles, Jan Bohl and Bernd Roggendorf. Nothing sits above it; a US sales subsidiary, Ableton Inc., is downstream. Ableton has taken no venture capital, and a Minnesota investor recorded in 2007 was gone by 2008.

It sells Live in three editions plus the Push hardware instrument, and reported revenue of EUR 72.8 million in its last published figures.