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Ryan Gavin edited this page Sep 19, 2026 · 12 revisions

User manual

open[flow] is a session manager for large Ableton Live sets. It gives you a real UI for the work Live's own grid makes slow: naming and coloring clips and scenes across a hundred-song set, tagging what each scene is for, and pushing the running order around before you commit to it.

Live stays the audio engine and the source of truth. This app reads and writes your set through a Max for Live device — it never touches your .als file.

Start here

Installing getting the device into Live and open
Reading the grid what you're looking at, and how to get around it
Playing things ⌘ is the "talk to Live" key — read this before clicking around

The work

Naming scenes the convention, song tags, and renaming a whole song at once
Roles tagging what a scene is for — intro, verse, chorus, jam
Color clips, songs, and coloring a whole set from a rule
The running order dragging songs and scenes into the order you want
Moving clips dragging clips between slots
Push one encoder that walks the running order by name, without the laptop
Visuals generated visuals that follow the set — its own app, with its own manual
Mixing stems mix[flow]'s lanes: which stems you get, and zooming in on them

When it goes wrong

Undo what comes back, and the one thing that doesn't
Keyboard reference every shortcut on one page
Troubleshooting the device's Status, the log, and common stalls

Bugs and questions go to Issues.

The two things to know up front

Nothing makes a sound unless you hold ⌘. Plain clicks and plain arrow keys select, fold and move. Add ⌘ (Ctrl on Windows) and Live responds — a clip fires, a scene launches, a track stops. That's what makes the grid safe to click around in while you're labelling a set. See Playing things.

Live's ⌘Z will not bring back anything this app writes. Renames and recolors go straight into Live's object model, which doesn't participate in Live's undo history. The app provides its own single-level undo instead. See Undo — including the operations that have no undo at all: reordering scenes, and moving clips.

Where your work is kept

Everything the app knows about your set is in the set. Song names, artists, keys, song tags and roles are written into scene names; colors are Live's own clip and scene colors; the default artist, role definitions and chosen palette live in the device, which Live saves into the .als.

There's no database and no sidecar file. Copy the .als to the gig laptop and it's all there — and it's all readable in Live's own Session View without this app running at all.

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