Alive 1.3.3

A fix for screens scaled above 100%: the window now grows together with its text.

Fixed

Text running out of its boxes on scaled screens (#1). At 125, 150 or 200% in Windows the letters grew with the screen while pills, tiles, rows and icons stayed at their 100% size, so labels spilled over the edges. The layout now takes its scale from the screen itself, and everything grows by the same factor.

New

Interface scale. Settings has a new line, Interface scale: 75, 100 or 125% on top of the Windows scale, for when the default feels too big or too small. It applies after a restart; the Restart now button appears right there.

If you are on 1.3.2

A fix release, so the daily check stays quiet; Check for updates in Settings finds it. Nothing to migrate: the catalog, tags, notes, pins and the history all carry over. Settings gain one key for the scale; 1.3.2 simply ignores it, so going back loses nothing.

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One .exe, no installer, no external DLLs. Requires .NET Framework 4.7+, which ships with Windows 11 and with Windows 10 since version 1703.

The build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will complain: More info → Run anyway. If your antivirus objects, the README explains why and what to do: every line of this is plain C# in this repository, and build.cmd reproduces the binary.

Alive-1.3.3.zip · SHA-256 078e2062aab86f900872f746c2b740b98f3f9b0e9ec01b3a63d7d32a088fd6fa

Alive 1.3.2

A small one: a few things that should take one click or one key, and a quieter screen when nothing is pinned.

New

Copy a set's plugin list. Hover over Plugins in a set's panel and a copy list link appears next to the heading. It puts the set's name on the clipboard, then the installed plugins and the missing ones, one per line: name, version, format and developer, separated by tabs, so it pastes straight into a spreadsheet or a message to whoever is opening your set.

Keys for the player. In the render player Shift Enter shows the selected render (or the playing one) in Explorer, the same key as everywhere else; the row menu shows it too. On the Plugins tab, where there is no set to play, Space pauses and resumes the render player.

Changed

• The star stays out of the way until you pin something: no empty star after the names on Home and no star in the list header while nothing is pinned. Pin a set and both come back.
• The dice button starts on three.

If you are on 1.3.1

A fix release, so the daily check stays quiet; Check for updates in Settings finds it. Nothing to migrate: the catalog, tags, notes, pins and the history all carry over, and going back to 1.3.1 loses nothing.

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One .exe, no installer, no external DLLs. Requires .NET Framework 4.7+, which ships with Windows 11 and with Windows 10 since version 1703.

The build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will complain: More info → Run anyway. If your antivirus objects, the README explains why and what to do: every line of this is plain C# in this repository, and build.cmd reproduces the binary.

Alive-1.3.2.zip · SHA-256 22456b7c8e75f5030e8c70221202e118ba429477412a9adbcdef24e472945af5

Alive 1.3.1

A review of the whole program, start to finish, and what came out of it: a handful of bugs, safer data files, a quicker start, and the small things that should have been there all along.

New

A day of your year in Live opens its projects. Click a day above the tiles: the projects you saved on it, the busiest first, and a pick takes you to its tile past any search or filter that hides it. The history starts remembering names with this version, so older days list only what Live's Backup folders still hold.

The full-screen preview moves like Live's arrangement (Ctrl Space). The wheel scrolls the tracks, Shift + wheel moves along the time, Ctrl + wheel zooms the time around the cursor, Alt + wheel makes the tracks taller, and the middle button drags both ways. Track names now run down the left, and a track is never lower than its name: a set with sixty tracks scrolls instead of squeezing them together. Bars are counted in the set's own meter, so a waltz is no longer counted in 4/4.

Samples, closer to Live's browser. → plays the selected sample from the start (on a folder it opens the folder); Space still starts and stops. A click on any empty spot (under the rows, on the panel, on the toolbar) stops the sound. The preview has a volume of its own, a slider right under the waveform, kept between starts.

Keys. Home and End jump to the ends of a list, ↓ in the search field goes on into the results, and Ctrl E exports the selected set (Export… and Copy path are in the row menu too). The calendar under Filters takes the keyboard: arrows walk the days, Page Up and Page Down turn the month, Enter picks.

Faster

The sample library is no longer walked on every start, only when the last whole walk is a day old or a folder has been added; F5 still walks it at once. On a library of 190,000 samples that walk took 41 seconds after every reboot, fighting Live for the disk while it loaded a set.

The plugin list loads faster. Checking that each plugin is still installed asked the disk about every one of some 6,400 records across ten Live installs, and that was nearly all of a 350 ms load.

Stat uses the main window's catalog instead of an index of its own: it opens without re-reading and re-weighing every project, sees the main window's rescans, and its F5 is the main window's.

Fixed

• A scan no longer breaks when a folder is added while it runs; the new folder is scanned right after.
• Home and the Sets list search the same things: name, folder, plugins, renders, tags and notes.
• A tile hidden by the search no longer stays selected, so Enter cannot open it; jumping to the playing set clears a search that hides it.
• The project panel no longer shows the previous set's arrangement picture.
• Going from Stat to a set no longer mixes up folders with similar names.
• Numbers stay English whatever the Windows language: a Russian Windows showed "128,5 BPM".
• The count in Filters matches the list, search and one row per folder included.
• With pinned-first sorting, Q moves the row at once.
• An empty date field opens the calendar with nothing picked; today used to look picked.
• After an export with errors, alive.log opens to say what went wrong.
• Row and tile text fades together with them, Stat's window grows with the screen scale like the main one, menus on Windows 11 get smooth rounded corners, and Open in Live on glass lost its grey box.
• The help (F1) is as tall as its content and no longer scrolls on a tall screen.
• One name for each thing everywhere (Export…, Rescue project…, Show in Explorer, Plugins), versions saved on one day show their time, and "1 track", "1 clip" read right.

Safer data

• Every .cfg is written whole, through a temporary file, and the previous version stays beside it as .bak. A power cut halfway no longer leaves half a file, and your tags and notes live in notes.cfg, which nothing can rebuild.
• A settings file another program held at the start is no longer replaced with defaults on exit.
• The waveform no longer fails on a file that is locked or cut short while it is being read.
• Two loads of the plugin database at once no longer loop.

If you are on 1.3

This is a fix release, so the daily check stays quiet: the dot on the gear is kept for steps like 1.4. Check for updates in Settings finds it. Nothing to migrate and nothing is read again: the catalog, tags, notes, pins and the history all carry over.

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One .exe, no installer, no external DLLs. Requires .NET Framework 4.7+, which ships with Windows 11 and with Windows 10 since version 1703. Earlier notes said 4.6; that was wrong, 1.3 already needed 4.7.

The build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will complain: More info → Run anyway. If your antivirus objects, the README explains why and what to do — every line of this is plain C# in this repository, and build.cmd reproduces the binary.

Alive-1.3.1.zip · SHA-256 c45ce33a6a9d0ab99671805b443c9deb26eda5eee927febe6b023afd71d19698

Alive 1.3

Sixteen commits since 1.2, and nearly all of them build one thing: a tab for the sample library.

New

Samples (Ctrl 4) — which packs and folders your sets actually use, and which have sat untouched since the day they were downloaded. Point it at your sample folders, or take the ones Live already knows: its browser Places, the User Library, the packs. The library is walked in the background and cached — a minute or two the first time on a couple of hundred thousand files, under a second after that.

Usage is counted by projects, not by files. Ten versions of one track are one use, and a sample that Collect All copied into a project still counts for the pack it came from.

Four lenses under Filters: the folder tree; Never used — the heaviest folders nothing was ever taken from, with the day each landed on the disk; Most used; and Duplicates — the same file in several places, compared by content, so a pack's Dry and Wet takes of one sound are not mistaken for copies. On the development machine it found 1.1 GB of them.

A sample plays the moment you select it, by a click or an arrow key, as in Live's browser; Space stops it. Its panel shows the waveform, the format, the projects it plays in and how they spread over the months, and where else the same file lies. Alive reads AIFF itself — Windows cannot — and marks the compressed AIFFs of Live's own packs, which only Live can play. Any sample drags straight into Live.

Columns work as on the other tabs: add Created, Modified or Copies from the header menu, drag a heading to move it, drag an edge to resize.

Both ways round. A set's panel on the Sets tab lists the sample folders it draws from, and a click opens that folder in the Samples tab.

One window for folders. Project folders and sample folders are two tabs of one window, and the window can be stretched.

Changed

Quiet out of the box. A fresh install starts with the update check, smooth scrolling and transparency off — each is one switch in Settings. Settings you already have are kept.

Settings link to this repository and to the developer's Telegram channel, t.me/RueBlose. Temporary files became Data folder: it holds your tags, your notes and the history of your work, and nothing in it is temporary. The README now lists what every file there holds.

The close button no longer loses its backing while the red fades, and the red is gone in a blink instead of lingering.

Reset beside the counter is a word now, not a circling arrow that read as "rescan".

If you are on 1.2

If you kept the daily check on, the dot on the gear has told you about this release. Nothing to migrate: the catalog, tags and pins carry over. The first start reads every set again — the catalog now remembers which samples each set plays — so give it a minute. The Samples tab starts empty: Add from Live, or Choose folders….

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One .exe, no installer, no external DLLs. Requires .NET Framework 4.6+, which ships with Windows 10 and 11.

The build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will complain: More info → Run anyway. If your antivirus objects, the README explains why and what to do — every line of this is plain C# in this repository, and build.cmd reproduces the binary.

Alive-1.3.zip · SHA-256 57aa80a7da3df06760f6fd65005f7e3ac3a89f6752235df898373430a64a5d20

Alive 1.2

Two commits since 1.1, both about one thing: Alive can now tell you that a newer version exists.

New

Update checking. Once a day Alive asks GitHub whether a newer release is out, and says so with one dot on the gear in the header. No popup, no dialog across your work — the dot waits until you look at it. It lights only for a release that moves the major or the minor number; a fix waits to be asked about. Open Settings and it goes out, and the same release will not light it again tomorrow.

Check for updates, in Settings on the same row as the version, asks on the spot and reports anything at all, fixes included. Unlike the daily check it admits when it could not reach GitHub — nobody is waiting on the background one, and you are waiting on this one. If something is found, the button turns into Open release page.

The switch beside it turns all of it off, and then Alive touches the network never. This is the only request the program ever makes, and nothing goes with it: nothing about you, nothing about your library, nothing about your machine. It is a plain GET for a public page, and GitHub learns from it exactly what any web server learns from anybody who opens one.

If you are on 1.1

Your copy knows nothing about any of this — the check ships in this release, so 1.1 cannot announce it. This is the last time you have to come here by hand.

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One .exe, no installer, no external DLLs. Requires .NET Framework 4.6+, which ships with Windows 10 and 11.

The build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will complain: More info → Run anyway. If your antivirus objects, the README explains why and what to do — every line of this is plain C# in this repository, and build.cmd reproduces the binary.

Alive-1.2.zip · SHA-256 49e11e1e37c6ab173a09d602f0e6e86ee064c009bb34ddddcb987c36f44d156b

Alive 1.1

Twenty-four commits since 1.0. Mostly window behaviour: Alive stopped being the one program on the machine that does not act like the others.

New

One copy at a time. A second launch hands its command line to the copy already running, brings that window forward and leaves. Two copies were not two windows but two owners of %APPDATA%\Alive — settings, tags and pinned projects are whole files, rewritten in one go, and whoever saved last won. A tag added in one copy disappeared the moment the other saved over it, and nothing said so.

The command line is read. A path given to Alive.exe — typed, dropped on the shortcut, or handed over by Open with — is answered the same way a drop onto the window is: a set the catalog already knows is shown, anything else is taken in as a new folder to watch.

The window opens where you left it. Position, size, and maximized if it was. A window left on a second monitor that has since been unplugged falls back to the middle of the main one instead of opening out of reach.

Open player. A new entry in a project's right-click menu, in both the tile and the list view: the project's whole list of renders, the waveform, and the choice of which one counts as the preview. It opens the window without starting the sound — that is what the play button is for.

Fixed

A pause pressed while a render was still opening was swallowed, and the track started a moment later by itself. Opening a file runs on its own thread, and the transport asked the device rather than itself; while the device was not ready the only answer it could give was "play".

The play button on a tile ignored every second press. Windows sends DOWN, UP, DBLCLK, UP for a quick double tap, and the second press was counted twice — play, pause, play — so the button could not be started and stopped quickly.

The playing animation survived a rescan. Folder watching or F5 left the sound going while the row and the tile lost their pulse: a set was recognised by object identity, and a scan republishes the catalog from disk.

A finished track no longer pulls in the next one if you had already pressed pause.

A click on the taskbar button minimizes the window, as it does for every other program — and the same for the player and Stat, which are windows of their own. They also have names in Alt+Tab now; the player sat there nameless.

Also

All documentation and code comments are in English. New screenshots throughout the README, and a Russian translation of the page beside it.

---

One .exe, no installer, no external DLLs. Requires .NET Framework 4.6+, which ships with Windows 10 and 11.

The build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will complain: More info → Run anyway. If your antivirus objects, the README explains why and what to do — every line of this is plain C# in this repository, and build.cmd reproduces the binary.

Alive 1.0

First public release.

Alive is a standalone catalog for your Ableton Live projects and plugins — one .exe, no
installer, no external DLLs. It parses the .als files themselves, so the list shows tempo, key,
Live version, track and plugin counts, project size, and whether the plugins a set needs are still
installed.

• Catalog — versions collapse per project folder, filters by date / Live version / key / track
  and plugin count / file state, tags and notes that bind to the folder rather than the .als.
• Plugins — the whole library from Live's own database, across every installed version: where
  each plugin lives, how many sets use it, whether it is installed right now.
• Rescue — reads Live's log to name the plugin a set died on, or finds it by bisecting on a
  copy. The original is never modified.
• Export — collect every file a set uses into a portable folder or .zip, with counts and
  sizes shown before you commit.
• Preview and player — the whole arrangement as one picture, and the render next to the set.
• Options.txt editor — 153 of Live's hidden options with descriptions, checkboxes instead of a
  text file, and a backup before every write.

Requires Windows 10 or 11 with .NET Framework 4.6+ (already there on both).

On first run Windows SmartScreen will warn about an unsigned app — More info → Run anyway.
If the file arrived over a messenger, right-click → Properties → Unblock. Some antivirus
heuristics flag the file collection and archiving as dropper-like behaviour; the build is plain C#
from the sources in this repository, with no packer and no obfuscation, and you can compile it
yourself with build.cmd.

Full description and screenshots are in the README.