alt Hacker NewsExcellent! I tried to use Claude on the Ableton file format about a year ago and it left me quite frustrated -- but now I have a new reason to look at this again.
Generally, it would be nice of Ableton to release an official documentation of their API.
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I've been vibe-coding a diff tool[1] for Ableton Live project files in my spare time, though the project is still far from complete. It's meant to generate human-readable, meaningful summary text that shows the differences between two versions of a project file (.als). With this diff tool, I can then use Git to properly version-control Ableton Live project files.
So far I've completed roughly 70% of the Ableton Live project-file XML parsing, though some parts like Session View and the Groove Pool are not finished yet.
As for using Claude or other agents to parse Ableton Live's XML, my original plan was to build an automated workflow with ableton-mcp: have Claude use ableton-mcp to make edits in a blank project (for example, add an EQ8 or modify some automation), save the project file, then have Claude compare the modified project file with the original blank project and write the corresponding parsing code. But ableton-mcp still lacks many features[2], and the XML schema of .als files is inconsistent, so I ended up doing most of the review and verification manually.
[1]: https://github.com/krfantasy/alsdiff [2]: https://github.com/ahujasid/ableton-mcp/pulls
The trick would have been to ask Claude to write a program that can parse/serialize from/to Ableton's XML format in the way you need it to. It's just XML, but a ton of it: https://github.com/stevengt/ableton-xml-analysis/blob/dev/ed...