Will Ableton ever allow 2 projects to be open at once?

[EmceeMindmelt]

Will Ableton ever allow 2 projects to be open at once?

I could go into great detail as to why this would speed up production, help people stay organized with ideas, files, samples, moving instrument racks around when needed, and on and on. I could list 100 reasons.

Why after all these years, you still cant open up 2 Ableton productions?

Thank you everyone

[scg]

In addition to posting here, you could send this to Ableton support as a suggestion or request, or maybe as a question about why it's not currently supported. My guess it that making this change probably isn't a high development priority, but that's speculation.

I know that Logic can run into fairly serious technical problems when more than one project is open at once (which is allowed, but discouraged). This may be specific to Logic's architecture though, and not due to anything that would affect Ableton as well. So I don't know if this limitation of Ableton's is due to technical obstacles, or if it just hasn't been a development priority. I'd be interested to know more about that. Maybe someone here will have some insight.

[silentio246]

I don`t know about mac, but on windows you can have more than one instance of Live open (since many years).
Can be activatet in the preferences.

[Cypeace]

You actually can have multiple instances opened (as previous post mentioned). The only limitation is that only one instance can play audio, but if all you want to do is move racks..

[scg]

As far as I know the 'multiple instances' option isn't available on Mac. But, if you're on Windows and want to try it, it's under Display & Input->Application Options (at least according to what I'm reading online). I assume that somehow the clipboard is shared between multiple instances of the app, since people are suggesting you can move or copy-paste items between them. (I can imagine it being beneficial even without that, although perhaps less so.)

[silentio246]

You actually can have multiple instances opened (as previous post mentioned). The only limitation is that only one instance can play audio, but if all you want to do is move racks..

All instances can play audio, if the audio driver is multiclient.

[silentio246]

As far as I know the 'multiple instances' option isn't available on Mac. But, if you're on Windows and want to try it, it's under Display & Input->Application Options (at least according to what I'm reading online). I assume that somehow the clipboard is shared between multiple instances of the app, since people are suggesting you can move or copy-paste items between them. (I can imagine it being beneficial even without that, although perhaps less so.)

Copy-paste is not possible, but you can drag and drop clips. The clip in the other set gets a new name though.

[cids]

You can always use the browser to import tracks from other projects

[[jur]]

You can open multiple instance of Live on mac, but for this you need multiple Live versions (e.g L12.0.10 and L12.0.25).
Only the version open first will give you full access to the Browser though.

[nicobi]

You can open multiple instance of Live on mac, but for this you need multiple Live versions (e.g L12.0.10 and L12.0.25).
Only the version open first will give you full access to the Browser though.

Well, on UNIX you can launch as many instances of an app as the hardware allows to. Apple does not provide that method directly through the user interface - for the good or the bad - but the terminal can be used for this. I have launched two instances by executing the following command two times (macOS 14.6.1, M1Max)

open -n /Applications/Ableton\ Live\ 12\ Suite.app

One could also launch the unix executable directly in the app-package which opens a terminal-session each time with some warning information. Yet two running instances of Live are the result.

As apps are identified by their unique Bundle IDs another method could be to duplicate the Live app-package, rename the copy and rename the Bundle ID in it. This would lead to different Live-apps but with equal software version. It is not clear to me if the Bundle ID dependencies are only in the info.plist within the app-package or also elsewhere. The info.plist contains quite some info. To test this seperate OS booting or a VM would be needed.

The second remark on the browser access from jur is not clear to me: Usually the function of an app should remain the same for each running instance or for each running duplicate app. Why should full Browser access only be available for the first launched app ? I would like to know more…


cheers

[Rivanni]

The second remark on the browser access from jur is not clear to me: Usually the function of an app should remain the same for each running instance or for each running duplicate app. Why should full Browser access only be available for the first launched app ? I would like to know more…

It's about how Live uses its database and the XMP files containing collection and tag information (and maybe some other files).
Only the first opened instance of Live has all the browser functionality, such as renaming, adding to a collection, creating folders, deleting items, tagging, saving presets, etc.
In all other instances, the browser is read-only. You can access and use all the files, but you are restricted from performing the actions I mentioned earlier.
Closing the first opened instance of Live will not restore restricted functionalities in the other opened instances. You must close everything before you can open a new first instance.

[nicobi]

It's about how Live uses its database and the XMP files containing collection and tag information (and maybe some other files).

Yes, I should have thought of that by myself - centralized app databases. That implies that measures must be taken that multiple instances do not write to the same databases where the writing operation ist not known to each other instance. And that means database lock for other instances except the first.

To overcome this Ableton would have to code a sort of client-server model in order to allow more than one instance to write to the same databases (which would lead to managing problems with the other running instances because those would have to agree to the changes for each planned change… not very feasable) or better to outsource database management from the main application. There instances would gain the feature to have theier own databases each. Would be a very high professional feature I would like to have - but the question is, well, …

Now if users would like to be able to work on their main project and occasionally flying in and copying over some sketches, ideas, etc. from another project - like an idea-collection or scratchpad project, there remain the following non complicated options obviously:

0. Users should check if hardware ressources like available RAM are sufficient. Launching a second instance with opening a huge project might lead to unexpected behavior. So that remains to be tested thoroughly.

1. Launch a second instance of Live via the terminal-command. In the second instance open the project you are interested in. Both instances will show with the same app-name - so that is to be taken into account for possible confusion.

2. I haven't tested this but duplicating the whole Live-App-bundle, renaming it and launching it with the terminal command should launch a second instance with a distinguishable name. Assuming that the displayed name of a running app is taken from the app-bundle name and not from the App-bundle-identifier.