Turn the knobs on a device without leaving the grid
The device chain showed shells. Now the triangle in a device's title bar opens
it, and an open device shows its controls — which work in both directions.
The fold is worth explaining rather than just listing, because it isn't only
tidying: the app follows the controls of open devices and no others, so folding
one shut is how you stop it costing anything. A page that presented the triangle
as a view preference would leave people wondering why a long chain got heavy.
The EQ Eight is drawn the way Ableton draws it; everything else gets a plain
plate of its controls in Live's order. Said plainly, because "less pretty and
just as connected" is the useful fact, not an apology.
Seven controls on the EQ Eight are greyed out, and the page says which and why
rather than leaving them looking broken — four the LOM doesn't publish at all,
two it publishes and the app doesn't read yet.
Also lands the mouse-table rows for the group chevron, which were written when
clicking a track header stopped folding groups and started opening devices.
Co-authored-by: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XgWVKDg9bAtZhhDoQjtqE4
Say that the mixer grabs, since a click used to throw a fader
The volume, pan and send fields were browser range inputs, which jump to wherever
you click. Live grabs the control where it already is, and now so do these — so a
stray click on a 26px pan field can no longer send it to one end, and the field is
usable at that size rather than offering about four positions.
Two things come with it that are worth a user knowing: ⌘ while dragging is fine
adjustment, taking or releasing it mid-drag without the control moving; and a
focused field takes the arrow keys at the parameter's own step size.
That last one is why the keyboard page needed more than a row. Its rule is that ⌘
means "make Live respond", and in the mixer ⌘ means fine — Live's own meaning, in
Live's own place. Stated outright rather than left as a quiet exception, and the
arrow keys get their own section so it's clear a focused control keeps them from
the grid until you click away.
Co-authored-by: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01CBNC3e13kZgJJ7bKvnTsm3
Describe the Master section, and roles as filled cells
The left edge is one region with one heading now, not a column plus a
column: the Songs label and the song-workflow buttons span the metadata
and Master columns together, filled with Live's Master colour the way
every track header is filled with its own. Nothing spells out that Master
is in there, so the page doesn't either — the launchers down the column
and the strip at its foot are what say so.
A role is no longer a pill beside a launcher. It fills its cell edge to
edge the way a clip's colour fills a slot, with the launcher recessed on
top, so a tagged scene reads as a slot with something in it; an untagged
one is a dim cell reading NONE, and a role nobody has coloured takes a
dashed outline. Roles.md, Color.md, Naming.md and the keyboard reference
all described the old pill.
Song headers split at the same boundary every other row does rather than
running the full width, and their identity is two lines: the name with
the artist beside it, then bpm, key, tag and 2/2 underneath. Open and
folded headers are the same shape now, which is worth saying plainly
because the folded one used to be a different layout — and because it is
why a folded song's name is readable rather than a strip left over after
the facts.
Both ASCII diagrams redrawn and re-aligned, and The-running-order stops
telling you to drag the header marked "part 2 of 2", which now reads 2/2
with the words in its tooltip.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JcqKqi7azGSadYatDcsyGD
Document the split left columns and the continuous song header
The grid's left edge is two columns now, not one. The metadata column
holds a scene's number, BPM and key and nothing else; the Master column
beside it is Live's Master track at the head of a column of its own,
carrying each scene's launcher and role above, and Stop All Clips and
Master's strip below. Both stay pinned while you scroll across the
tracks.
What that changes for a reader: the ▶ is in the Master column rather than
a gutter of the scene's own, the role chip sits beside it, the Songs
heading is no longer tinted with Live's Master color — that color went
with the Master column — and Master's strip is the same size as every
other strip rather than a wider one centred in an oversized cell.
An open song header is one continuous bar across the whole grid, with its
name, artist, facts, tag and flags pinned to the left edge so scrolling
out to track 30 still says which song those clips belong to. The song tag
is gone from the scene rows: every scene of a song carries the same one,
so a column of them said nothing the header hadn't.
Both ASCII diagrams are redrawn and re-aligned. The width table's track
counts are recomputed for the narrower left edge — Narrow fits about 11
tracks now, Wide about 7 — and the 8/16 note says that Master takes a
track's worth of width without being one of the eight.
Two things were stale before this and are fixed with it: "click a scene
name" described a gesture whose target shows no name, and Troubleshooting
still recommended the S column width, which was removed some time ago.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JcqKqi7azGSadYatDcsyGD
Song tags, the sort hierarchy, and following Live
Brings the manual up to the 2026-08-07 work. Three of these were not
additions but corrections — the pages described behaviour the app no
longer has.
The convention lost its BPM. A scene name is `[ROLE] @{key} {SONG}
{TAG}`; the tempo lives on Scene.tempo, which is the one fact Live
already has a home for, and duplicating it into the name meant two
answers that could disagree. Naming is rewritten around that, with the
three readable legacy forms in a table so a half-converted set is
recognisable rather than mysterious.
Song tags are new and get a section rather than a page: an open,
optional, brace-delimited classification of what the song is. The braces
are the point — they make an arbitrary tag reversible without a fixed
vocabulary, which is what keeps the mapping derivable from the name
alone. Roles gets the tag-versus-role distinction, since one describes a
scene and the other a song, and they are deliberately different marks.
Roles and the chosen palette moved out of bsv.json and localStorage into
a hidden device parameter, so Live writes them into the .als. That is a
better story than the one it replaces and Installing, Roles and Color
each told the old one. Home gains a section saying it plainly: there is
no database, and the set is the storage.
The palette is now compiled in. Color and Troubleshooting documented a
Re-derive button that no longer exists — worse than incomplete, since
someone would have gone looking for it.
Following Live is documented with its failure mode stated out loud. It
watches the Session cursor and it is the least verified path in the app,
so "a clip drawn in two places means this got it wrong, press sync" is
in both Reading the grid and Troubleshooting. A manual that only
described the happy path would leave the one symptom worth reporting
looking like a bug in the reader's set.
The same commit records what following Live cost: a write no longer
re-reads the set, so it no longer quietly catches up on changes made in
Live as a side effect. That is a regression from the user's seat and it
says so.
Also: the sort hierarchy in the running order, per-scene slices in
folded song headers, ⌘A, and the bar.beat.sixteenth readout that has
been in the header since the branded transport and was never written up.
Some of this documents work that is still in the working tree, so the
manual is briefly ahead of the released device.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MutvDXT74GQ57Jjztt21cz
Group tracks, dragging scenes and clips, meters
Catches the manual up with the grid.
Track groups were described as a header row spanning their members, with a
folded group standing in as a count column. They're columns now — a group is a
real track at the head of what it contains, with a launcher that fires the whole
group and a bar showing how far it reaches. Folding writes back to Live, so it
survives a snapshot.
New page for moving clips, since it overwrites and has no undo — that needs
saying somewhere it can't be missed rather than as a bullet on another page.
Dragging a single scene joins the running order, which is now three ways to
reorder rather than two.
Track headers carry each track's own color from Live, and the meter toggle is
mentioned where the header is described.
Dropped ⌥ from the mouse tables. It used to add to a selection and no longer
does anything; both pages that taught it now say so, since a shortcut people
learned going quiet is worse than one that never existed.