Is it possible to create an AbletonLive plugin that provides a UI as well as a button to load a series of files as sound clips?

Question

I want to dynamically populate a MIDI AUDIO track's clips section with a bunch of mp3s in a folder that change hourly.

I want to create a GUI where I can tune the frequency of how often new clips are loaded into the MIDI AUDIO track's clips section.

Is this possible with Ableton Live's Developer SDK? does this even exist? If not, is there another more accessible DAW for this type of custom GUI work?

Answer 1

You can create custom GUIs using Max for Live.

You can't, however, add mp3 files to a MIDI instrument's clips, even manually. Audio files such as mp3s can only be added as clips to Audio tracks. MIDI instruments can only be added to MIDI tracks, and the clips on MIDI tracks must be MIDI clips.

Unfortunately, Max for Live does not yet provide a way to programmatically add audio files as clips even on audio tracks. So, I'm afraid you can't implement this with Ableton Live.

Answer 2

The way to create UI devices in Live that are capable of accessing the Live API would be to use Max for Live (documentation here).

Assuming you meant adding mp3s to clip slots of Audio tracks (as opposed to MIDI tracks), indeed it does not not currently seem possible to do that via the API. The create_clip function of the ClipSlot object only applies to MIDI tracks.

For reference the full API is specified here.