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An Ableton Live set is gzipped XML (2012)
- zaik 5y agoCompressing XML files is not exactly uncommon. Microsoft Office does it too.
- williamscales 5y agoThe headline lead me to believe Ableton Live actually includes a Ruby gem in the "Ableton Live Set". This is not the case, the article discusses a Ruby gem for parsing these live set files.
- alternatetwo 5y agoI have actually used the fact that you can "easily" read these projects by eye in the past. 1. Some tracks have some really odd BPMs ... not 127, but 127.0346867 or something. Live unfortunately only ever shows two digits in the clip view. So if after a while you want to know the exact bpm you figured out, you have a slight problem: But, the XML exposes the accurate value. Unfortunately not for the global project BPM, though ... so don't figure out a bpm via that ... 2. I was reconstructing some film music stuff and needed copy clip fades exactly to another clip, but those clips didn't originally start and end at the same time (so any solution regarding replacing the source file wouldn't have worked). So I manually copied the clip fades in the XML somehow, I don't exactly remember how it worked, but I did get the exact same fades in the end. They only switched to this format with Live 9 btw, Live 8 uses some proprietary binary format.
- rkns 5y agoThe first version using gzipped XML was 8.2.2
- alternatetwo 5y agoAh, that is interesting. For a specific reason I'm still keeping a copy of 8.2.1 around, the version just before that, but I've actually currently forgotten that reason. I think the way it renders audio files, newer versions write the whole thing twice, that version only once, which helps with huge audio files sometimes where I only need to do basic processing.
- nusaru 5y agoI wonder what happened to Michael (author of this article). Radio silence for nearly a decade.
- suprjami 5y agoHis last GitHub commit was 2016. Try email him? I also haven't updated my blogspot blogs in a long time.
- nusaru 5y agoHis last commit was actually in 2012; the repository you looked at had an issue opened more recently (or a star, not sure how GitHub’s “last updated” feature works). Hoping he responds to my email.
- marcodiego 5y agoSo are MSO and libreoffice files. I actually like the idea: it allows me to extract image, text and view some structures without the need of any specialized tools.
- grishka 5y agoThose are zip archives with multiple xml files and assets, not just gzipped xml.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoThis is very, very useful for something I'm currently working on.
- Orionos 5y agoSo you're telling me you're developping version control for Ableton projects ? Because that's something I need !
- Nihilartikel 5y agoThe DAW Renoise also saves to a zip file of xml and sample data.
- uberdru 5y agoThis is genius. I work in Logic and for whatever reason (right brain left brain prejudice?) never thought to look at the source files. Wondering is anyone has done similar things with Logic?
- bjt 5y agoThis is why Bitwig was recently able to add Ableton project import.
- omgmajk 5y agoI guess not all people investigate files out of curiosity. If you are into save files for games a lot of them use gzip->xml, gzip->json or gzip->weird list.