Write, compose, experiment and perform with Ableton Live 12 (and, experimentally, Live 11), Max for Live, and Ableton Push 1 and 2 on your distro of choice with a fully customised, purpose-built Wine fork that makes Live a first-class Linux citizen.

Very unofficial, not endorsed by or affiliated in any way with Ableton.

DOWNLOAD HERE: https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux/releases/latest/download/install-ableton-latest.run

Place this installer + an Ableton Live zip file downloaded from Ableton.com in the same directory, and run. For more details, see Getting Started.

Credits: maintained by Cade 'shibco' Diehm, with support from ClickSentinel and the Ableton Linux Discord community including jackson-57, jttdev, astrazds, Version33 and 0tanh. Application and MIME type icons by yioannides. Shout out to wowitsjack/Antlers! on the Ableton Linux Discord server for ENCORE.

• Support for all Live 12 editions (Intro, Standard, Suite, Trial), and experimental Live 12 Beta support.
• Experimental Live 11 support: see Live 11.
• Push 1 + 2 support (with highly speculative and experimental Push 3 support).
• Experimental Ableton Link support: keep tempo in sync with other apps and instruments on your network. See Ableton Link.
• Device recovery: audio and MIDI devices (Push included) survive in-session disconnect and reconnect.
• Experimental Max/MSP and Max for Live support.
• Open/save dialogs use your system's native file picker.
• Show in Explorer opens your system's file manager with the file selected.
• Dark/light theme mode that follows your system's settings.
• Unified top bar: Live's menu bar and menus take the colors of your Ableton theme and render in Ableton's own typeface, like the official Push standalone. Theme changes apply to the running Live when the settings dialog closes.
• System font support: display Ableton's UI with your desktop interface fonts.
• Low-latency audio via autobuilt PipeASIO, a native PipeWire ASIO driver, at 256 frames, with additional hardening to prevent crashes. Live can record from any PipeWire source, out of the box.
• Optional one-command tuning that lets Live run at even lower latency without crackles. See Lower latency.
• VST3/JUCE/OpenGL editor windows render, take input, and scale correctly.
• HiDPI support: display scales from 100% to 250% are auto-detected and recalibrated on every launch.
• Experimental support for Ableton's forthcoming Extensions SDK.
• VST specific fixes for Arturia, Pianoteq, SWAM, U-he, KORG and many others, with more to follow.
• Reproducible builds.
• Stable, fast, and integrated into your Linux operating system.

Most popular distros and configs are supported. Flatpak / steam-run / sandboxed environments are not yet fully supported!

You need a 64-bit x86 machine, a 2022-or-newer distro (glibc 2.35+), and PipeWire 0.3.56 or newer (1.6+ recommended for the lowest latency). The installer checks all of this and tells you what's missing.

1. Download Ableton Live from ableton.com (the ableton_live*.zip download, any edition).
2. Download the latest installer: install-ableton-latest.run (versioned builds are on the Releases tab).
3. Put both files in the same directory, then run the installer and follow its instructions: double click install-ableton-latest.run, or run

sh ~/Downloads/install-ableton-latest.run

The installer verifies itself, installs the patched Wine to ~/.local/opt, detects your display scale, creates the Wine prefix at ~/.wine-ableton, then starts the Ableton installer it found next to itself. Click through that as normal. Nothing outside your home directory is touched.

Then launch Live from your applications menu, or with:

ableton-live

Installing Live 11? Read Live 11 first.

1. Download the newest installer.
2. Run it: sh install-ableton-latest.run --update
3. There is no step 3!

This updates the patched Wine, the launcher and the prefix policy. Ableton Live itself, your settings and your license are kept. Running the installer without --update offers the same update when it finds an existing installation.

Updating from 2026.07.18.1 also removes the -DontCombineAPCs line that release added to Live's Options.txt. The line causes stuttering, slowed-down audio during playback (issue #29). The update removes it even if you added it by hand.

File an issue on GitHub. There are diagnostic scripts in ./beta/scripts that will help pin down the problem.

A few more things to do after you launch for the first time:

1. Ableton's Settings → untick Auto-Scale Plugin Window (prevents a plugin-window resize loop).
2. Preferences → Audio → Driver Type ASIO → Device PipeASIO.

If you encounter any unexpected audio behaviour, open an issue or +1 an existing one and I'll fix as a priority!

Live 11 support is new and experimental. A Live 11 install differs in three ways:

1. Set ABLETON_LIVE_VERSION=11 when you run the installer. Live 11 needs a different set of support files than Live 12, and this installs the right ones. They are downloaded during setup, so you need to be online:

   ABLETON_LIVE_VERSION=11 sh ~/Downloads/install-ableton-latest.run
   

2. After your first Live 11 launch, run the Max for Live fixup once. Max 8 crashes on its second start over a preferences file its first start wrote. The fixup moves that file aside (nothing is deleted) and Max regenerates it:

   sh ~/Downloads/install-ableton-latest.run --extract /tmp/ableton-kit
   bash /tmp/ableton-kit/scripts/setup-prefix.sh --post-first-run
   

3. Known limitation: previewing or importing WMA or video files crashes Live 11. A fix is planned. Avoid those files in Live's browser for now; details in notes/ABLETON-WINE-LIVE11-WMVCORE-STUB.md.

The launcher finds Live 11 by itself. With both 11 and 12 in the prefix the newest wins; launch a specific version with ABLETON_LIVE_VERSION=11 ableton-live, or pin an exact edition with ABLETON_LIVE_EXE.

To run a plugin installer inside your Live environment:

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ableton ~/.local/opt/wine-d2d1-nspa-11.11/bin/wine \
    "/path/to/PluginInstaller.exe"

You can also manually install plugin .vst3 files inside the ~/.wine-ableton/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/VST3/ directory.

Do you have a Linux-only plugin? Run them in Carla or Ildaeil alongside Live and route audio and MIDI over PipeWire! Guide for this to follow!

This is built in. Use Preferences → Link, Tempo & MIDI → enable one Push2 row, Live Port for both input and output, and enable the remote toggles.

Like all other MIDI and Audio devices, Push will survive in-session disconnects.

Link syncs tempo, beat and phase between apps and devices on your local network (UDP port 20808). Support is new and experimental. Two complementary setups, both applied by ./scripts/setup-link.sh from a checkout of this repository (optional, safe to re-run, uses sudo for the network and firewall changes):

• Option A: Live joins directly. The script finds your network interface (refusing VPNs; Link does not work over one), adds the network route Link's traffic needs, and opens UDP port 20808 in your firewall. Then enable the Link toggle in Live (Preferences → Link, Tempo & MIDI → "Show Link Toggle").
• Option B: native bridge (recommended). jack_link is a small helper that joins the Link session natively on your machine, so the session survives Live restarts and native Linux apps can sync too. Build jack_link and create the jack-link.service user unit per notes/ABLETON-WINE-LINK.md, then re-run the script to enable it. The launcher also starts the bridge when it is installed but not already running.

Your router must forward multicast, and Link never crosses VPNs. Option A is unverified under Wine: if Live's peer count stays at zero, the bridge still joins and syncs the session.

Not working? Check these, in order:

• ip route show 224.0.0.0/4 lists a route via the physical LAN interface, not a VPN device
• Firewall: sudo ufw status | grep 20808 or firewall-cmd --list-ports shows 20808/udp
• sudo tcpdump -i <iface> -n udp port 20808 shows datagrams to 224.76.78.75.20808 once any peer is active
• pgrep -a jack_link shows the bridge running, and ~/.log/jack_link/ records session activity
• Live's Control-Bar Link indicator is enabled and reports a peer count ≥ 1
• A tempo change on any peer propagates to all others

From a checkout of this repository, run:

./scripts/setup-realtime.sh

It applies the standard Linux pro-audio settings: permission for Live to use realtime scheduling, less eager memory swapping, and a service that keeps the CPU at full speed. It uses sudo and prints every file it writes. Deeper tweaks (kernel options) are only suggested, never applied.

Log out and back in, then check that ulimit -r prints 95. The launcher checks for realtime permission on every start and from now on runs Live with it.

Some distributions grant realtime permission out of the box (CachyOS is one), so Live may already run with realtime scheduling before you run the script. ulimit -r printing 10 or higher means the launcher uses it. Launch with ABLETON_RT=off ableton-live to run without realtime scheduling, for a comparison run or on a machine with few CPU cores.

• patches/: the Wine patch series + the pipeasio series
• scripts/: install, prefix setup, launcher
• vendor/: pinned build inputs
• notes/: patch notes and investigations
• tools/: diagnostic tools
• bin/: launchers
• dist/: build outputs
• beta/: beta test program

Building needs podman or docker, about 10 GB of disk, zstd, cabextract and binutils. If you're working on this and want to try building and installing:

./build.sh
./scripts/install.sh
./scripts/setup-prefix.sh
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ableton ~/.local/opt/wine-d2d1-nspa-11.11/bin/wine \
    "/path/to/Ableton Live 12 Suite Installer.exe"
ableton-live

./scripts/make-installer.sh compiles everything into dist/ableton-wine-setup-<version>.run.

It verifies itself, installs the runtime, detects the display scale, creates the prefix, then runs the Ableton installer it finds next to itself (pauses so you can add one; prints the manual commands otherwise).

setup-prefix.sh and the launcher auto-detect the display scale (GNOME, KDE, sway, Hyprland, X11 Xft.dpi); the launcher recalibrates the prefix DPI on every start. Scales from 100% to 250% are calibrated: on GNOME the prefix tracks mutter's upscaled framebuffer (LogPixels = 96 × ceil(scale) plus a per-monitor DPI flag), on other desktops plain LogPixels = round(96 × scale). Unfortunately, switching monitors still needs a Live restart if those monitors have different DPIs. You can manually override the default scaling behaviours with ABLETON_DPI_MODE.

Mostly unnecessary. But in case you need them:

• ABLETON_WINE_ROOT runtime path (default ~/.local/opt/wine-d2d1-nspa-11.11)
• ABLETON_WINEPREFIX prefix path (default ~/.wine-ableton)
• ABLETON_LIVE_VERSION 11 | 12: the Live version the prefix setup prepares for and the launcher picks (see Live 11)
• ABLETON_LIVE_EXE full path to a Live exe inside the prefix; picks one exact install when several editions coexist (the launcher refuses to guess)
• ABLETON_DPI_MODE auto | preserve | 100 | fractional | dpi<N> (force LogPixels N with no per-monitor flag, e.g. dpi144 for 150% on a non-GNOME desktop)
• ABLETON_THEME_MODE auto | dark | light | preserve: the launcher syncs Live's light/dark theme key to the desktop scheme on every start; this overrides it
• ABLETON_TOPBAR_MODE live | system | preserve | '#RRGGBB #RRGGBB': the launcher colours Live's menu bar and menus like your Ableton theme (live, the default) or like your desktop titlebar (system: KDE colour scheme, or the stock GNOME header colours). preserve keeps the plain scheme colours, a hex pair forces bar and text colours
• ABLETON_UI_FONT auto | preserve | off | a font family name: the launcher renders Live's menu bar and dialogs with the Ableton Sans typeface shipped inside your Live install. off restores Tahoma, a family name uses that instead
• ABLETON_DCOMP on (default) | off: disables DirectComposition for that launch; an A/B check if the Learn View misrenders
• ABLETON_RT on (default) | off: runs Live without realtime scheduling even when the system permits it (see Lower latency)
• PIPEASIO_* audio driver overrides, e.g. PIPEASIO_PREFERRED_BUFFERSIZE=512 if you hear crackles; defaults live in ~/.config/pipeasio/config.ini
• ENGINE=docker for build.sh / make-installer.sh

Desktop Mode only. The installer bundles everything it needs, so no extra SteamOS packages are required and updates survive SteamOS upgrades.

You can learn all about the patches here: patches/BASE.txt.

Questions? cade@parare.al

Local models (Qwen 3.6) and Claude Opus were used during QA testing, documentation checking, and to help setup the build pipeline at the very end of this project's release.