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LiveAPI

LiveAPI

Reference for the Live Object Model and Remote Scripts.
Start with the LOM View on GitHub

Independent reference site. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Ableton AG.

Reference for Ableton Live’s in-process Python runtime. Two concerns covered: the Live Object Model (the object hierarchy any in-Live script can read, mutate, and listen to) and Remote Scripts (the runtime shell — how Live loads a script, the tick cycle, the threading rules).

The structural surface (types, listenability, settability, signatures) comes from runtime introspection. The behavioral surface (when a mutation becomes visible, what fires a listener, what raises) is being built up incrementally — see the documentation roadmap for the path.

Start here

Section titled “Start here”
Remote scripts How Live loads a Python script, the 100ms tick, and the threading rules every callback obeys.
Live Object Model Universal identity, lifetime, canonical_parent — the model every LOM class inherits.
Listeners Property subscription model. add / remove / has triplets, callback lifetime, threading.
Calling conventions Methods and functions take positional arguments only — kwargs raise.

How this is built

Section titled “How this is built”

Live’s Python API has no published reference, so the content here is assembled from sources that observe the binding directly:

  • Runtime introspection of a Live install. Names, types, signatures, listenability, settability, enum members, and the class hierarchy come from interrogating the live binding inside a running Live process. This is the structural backbone — what the API looks like.
  • Decompiled Ableton-shipped Remote Scripts. Live ships ~140 control-surface scripts written by Ableton; their bytecode is decompiled and cross-referenced as evidence of how the API is actually used — argument names, idiomatic call sites, expected types.
  • Max for Live documentation. The M4L proxy describes a related-but-distinct API; the prose informs hover docs but is never used in signatures (M4L type claims and parameter names describe the proxy, not the binding).
  • Hand-authored behavioral prose. The introspection can tell you what’s there; it can’t tell you when a mutation becomes visible, what raises, or what fires a listener. That layer is hand-written, marked authored where it sits alongside the runtime docstring.

For pipeline details, source-code structure, contributing, and open issues, see the GitHub repository.

Typed Python Stubs

Section titled “Typed Python Stubs”

This site is the deeper reference behind the typed .pyi stubs shipped from the same repository. Install for autocomplete and static type checking — pyright and mypy auto-discover via PEP 561, no configuration needed:

Terminal window
pip install ableton-live-stubs

Each release pins a specific Live version. Setup, usage, and bleeding-edge install instructions on GitHub.

About

Section titled “About”

Live 12.3.6

Tracks the latest published Live version.

In progress

Coverage grows incrementally. Members without authored prose render with their structural skeleton.

This is an independent reference site. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Ableton AG. “Ableton”, “Live”, “Push”, and related marks are trademarks of Ableton AG.