How to choose an AI assistant
for Ableton Live

1. What does it observe?

This is the one that decides which questions a tool can answer at all. A tool reading the manual can tell you what a device does and cannot tell you your bass is wide. A tool reading the project file knows your arrangement and has never heard it. A tool scoring an upload heard one bounce, once, and not the loop you are on now. A tool measuring the output while it plays knows what came out of the machine and knows nothing about how you got there.

None of those is better. They answer different questions.

2. What does it change?

Some of these tools write into your session: MIDI clips, devices, mixer settings, stem tracks. Some change nothing at all. This is not a quality ranking either, but it is the one with consequences. A tool that writes needs your trust and a backup habit. A tool that only reads can be wrong without costing you a session.

3. What does it need running?

Every one of these needs something on your machine: a helper bridge, a plugin, a desktop app, or a browser tab with a local connection behind it. It runs in the cloud is rarely the whole answer. Ask what has to be installed and what that piece can reach.

4. Does it write to your set?

Worth asking twice, and separately from question 2, because the answer is often buried under a feature list. Reading a set and writing to a set are two different permissions. A tool can do the first without the second, and a tool that does the second can undo work you did not ask it to touch.

Tool by tool, in their own words

Miles (ours)

What it observes: the audio coming out of your machine while it plays, measured twice a second, locally: loudness in LUFS, true peak, key and chord. The open Live set, through a read only bridge. One still of your DAW window, at the moment you ask a question that needs eyes.

What it changes: nothing. There is no write path into your set.

What it needs: a desktop app next to Live. Nothing to install inside Live.

Measured here: the byte level capture run of what the app sends is published in full, including the sentence in our own privacy copy that the measurement proved wrong.

Status: closed beta. No public download and no date.

LIA

VIXSOUND

Where Miles is the wrong choice

Pick something else if you want the tool to do the work.

If you want MIDI generated, stems split into tracks, devices loaded or the mixer moved by voice, Miles cannot do any of it and is not going to. It has no write path into your set. The tools above are built for that and they say so in their own words, quoted here.

Pick Miles if you want to know what came out of the machine, with the number attached, while the loop is still playing.

Those are different jobs. Plenty of people want both, and nothing stops you running both, because one of them never touches your set.

Questions