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Comment by devthane | Hacker News Reader

I found it interesting to discover that an Ableton Live project file is a gzipped xml file as well, so you can get at the xml by gunzipping it.

I've played around with trying to generate a schema file from a project file with mixed results.

I very much wish Ableton would support this format or at least publish their schema somewhere so translation could be done.

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This. I've been trying to write a VCS for Ableton projects but their schema is way too complex to try to make sense of it.

Ableton is incredibly hostile to third party devs building upon their work. Eg: There is no official documentation for any of their Python APIs.

Although the python API could be documented, it was not meant to be a public API. And it seems the open source community managed to generate the documentation.

I don't know any other DAW that allows as deep integration for third party devs through their Max for Live API.

If it was not meant to be public, then why do vendors who partner with Ableton and build hardware for Live complain about the lack of documentation?

The documentation generated by the community is severely lacking and it enables only elementary usage of the API

>I don't know any other DAW that allows as deep integration for third party devs through their Max for Live API.

REAPER?

Ah makes sense. I was just thinking of the "big name" ones. I need to look into Reaper again.

REAPER has unsurpassed scripting and extension, every other DAW looks like a joke in comparison.

Ya, Reaper is the only DAW (I know of) that allows me to import midi, apply fx, and render tracks via scripts.

Not really DAW but bipscript is interesting for this use case

FL Studio has a well documented python API to allows 3rd party scripts!

> it seems the open source community managed to generate the documentation

That would be terrific. Do you have more?

A while ago, I tried to cutomize a Novation Launchpad but couldn’t find coherent docs or an intro.

Some people have mastered it, as witnessed by this great extension [1]. But that’s example code, not a documentation.

[1] https://github.com/hdavid/Launchpad95

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