Ableton Forum

Normally, Live makes it easy to share sets with people who don't own the same plugins as you do--you can just freeze the track, and they can still use the frozen version. As far as I can tell, though, this feature doesn't extend to *Ableton* instruments. I'm working with someone who owns Suite (I don't). He sent me a set that uses Analog, but he froze all his tracks so I could use them. However, as soon as I open the set, I get the dreaded "You don't own this instrument and won't be able to save changes" message.

I thought Ableton's instruments were supposed to be so much better integrated with Live, and they're supposed to make everything easier. And yet it's impossible to share frozen tracks with them like you would a regular plugin, because it will just lock out anyone who doesn't own it. Which makes brilliant sense from a marketing perspective, since it tempts more people to buy their instruments just to avoid this stupid hassle, but it's a crappy deal for end users. I won't be picking up Suite anytime soon! </rant>

Is there any way to share frozen Ableton instruments? I know you could record everything to audio and then *delete* the original track with the Ableton instruments, but that creates huge problems if you ever want to go back and modify the original sound. And I don't want to maintain two versions of every set--one version that I use and one version that I share.

Anyone else have any ideas? (Or anyone else want to share in my rant?!)

Anyone else have any ideas?

Nope. You hit the nail on the head. All about marketing and sales. If they allowed this be the case they wouldn't sell many suites versions. Just my opinion.

tlennon wrote:

Anyone else have any ideas?

Nope. You hit the nail on the head. All about marketing and sales. If they allowed this be the case they wouldn't sell many suites versions. Just my opinion.

Ableton 1, Customers 0.

And I say that as someone who's always defended Ableton. But I've had so many recent problems with collaboration that this was finally the last straw.

Hi folks,

This is currently not possible, because we'd need a way to disable the ability to unfreeze the track. But I could imagine a situation in which the Set could be used in its frozen state and only unfreezing would be "protected." I don't anticipate this happening soon, but I'll put it in as a feature request.

Thanks,

The track has to be flattened to audio before you can use it.
I did a bunch of collabs that way.

Dennis DeSantis wrote:Hi folks,

This is currently not possible, because we'd need a way to disable the ability to unfreeze the track. But I could imagine a situation in which the Set could be used in its frozen state and only unfreezing would be "protected." I don't anticipate this happening soon, but I'll put it in as a feature request.

Thanks,

Would make alot of sense and save a bit of messing about when colloborating with someone who doesnt have the suite version.
TBH - I usually end up exporting all the audio tracks anyway to be absolutely sure that no other plugins have a winge

BTW - While your at it - make the export have an option to also additionally export master track via the LAME encoder - also saving a bit of time, so can dump stems and an mp3 mix at the same time