AbletonTweets - The Blog

It’s official, as of May 14th: Pluggo is dead, as Cycling ‘74 throw their weight into Ableton Live, and migrate their plug-in technology to the forthcoming Max for Live technology to be shipped later this year.

Peter Kirn has already blogged in some detail about what this might mean for the custom plugin ecosystem. Certainly, from a read of the official Cycling ‘74 forums, there has been a fair amount of hostility, partly (and justifiably) from users who have invested time and effort into other DAWs, partly (somewhat less justifiably) from those who regard Ableton Live as some kind of toy production environment for producing DJ loops.

Of most interest is criticisms that Live doesn’t provide feature X, Y or Z that some other sequencer does. True, but in the longer term this ignores one of the two design aims of Max for Live: it is not only an environment for creating instruments and effects within Live, it is also a sophisticated system to allow Live to be controlled and reconfigured programmatically. Pluggo was sandboxed into the restrictive enclosures of VST, AU and RTAS - this alone created huge technical hurdles that Cycling ‘74 decided were not worth overcoming - but Max for Live will be much more tightly integrated into Live as a whole, opening the prospect of Max-driven scripting and configuration of Live itself. (And within Max, this can then mean Java, Javascript, Python or Ruby.) Want a new feature? Here’s a bit of Max code which adjusts and reprograms a bit of Live to do what you need.

We are somewhat in the realm of speculation here, and it’s been made clear that delivery of the Live scripting side of Max for Live is of lower priority than the Pluggo-style hosting, but I’m choosing to be optimistic. There are two readings of the title in www.ableton.com/extend - new plugins for Live, and new methods for extending the features and behaviour of Live itself. Let’s wait and see what happens.