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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.
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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.
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.
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.