changelog

Faster everything

Big pass on the OSC + session-state overhead. ABEL now stays quiet unless it actually needs to talk to Live, and the built-in actions land noticeably quicker.

Improved

• Send to Arrangement - dropped the pre-flight OSC playhead lookup (2 GETs, up to ~1.5s each waiting for AbletonOSC). Samples now land at bar 1; drag once in Live if you want them somewhere else.
• Send to Simpler - trimmed ~450ms of fixed sleeps and parallelized the arm / monitor / disarm sends after track creation.
• Idle OSC chatter ? zero. Killed the background selection poll that was firing every 2 seconds forever whether you were talking to ABEL or not.
• Session-state cache. ABEL used to refresh its picture of your Live set (20+ OSC roundtrips) after every action, on every chat turn, whether the message needed it or not. Now it caches - mutations flip a dirty flag, and the state only gets refetched when the next task actually requires it.
• Sidebar refresh on-demand. Post-action sidebar auto-updates removed. You're looking at Ableton anyway; hit the ? next to SESSION when you want ABEL to catch up.
• ElevenLabs Music V2 audio - Worker now normalizes the response shape correctly (was silently saving 0 KB files on first release).

Fixed

• Delete sample - file locks (Sample Player audio handle, Live's browser scan) no longer block deletion. Retries a couple of times, then stashes to a .trash/ folder as a last resort so the library UI immediately reflects the delete.
• Chat input scrollbar stripped down to invisible; scrolling still works.
• Generate panel - Load button matches the model dropdown height, long model names ellipsis-truncate instead of covering the caret, and "Loading." pulses so it reads as active work.

Notes

• With sidebar auto-refresh gone, session_update broadcasts only fire from an explicit refresh press or from the initial connection. The LLM still knows the current Live state whenever it needs to - it just pulls once, on-demand, instead of ABEL pre-fetching after every action.

ElevenLabs Music V2 + track-build fixes

Another cloud song-gen option and a couple of quality-of-life fixes for chat-driven track building.

New

• ElevenLabs Music V2 added to the Generate dropdown. Two variants - default (model decides on vocals) and instrumental-forced. Cloud, no download or load step. Length up to 10 minutes.
• Settings ? Models now lists ElevenLabs Music V2 alongside MiniMax so you can see both cloud options at a glance.

Improved

• Stock-instrument builds. When you ask ABEL to build a track ("make me a chiptune dubstep track"), it now sticks to bare Live 12 stock devices (Drum Rack, Bass, Wavetable, Operator, Analog, Drift, Meld, .) instead of inventing preset names like "Kit-Core 808" that only exist in specific Packs and silently fail to load.
• Chat input scrollbar hidden - tiny thumb strip is gone; scrolling still works.
• Generate panel polish - Load button now matches the model dropdown height, long model names ellipsis-truncate instead of covering the down-arrow, and the "Loading." state gently pulses so it reads as active work.

Sign-in fixes

Small patch on top of the launch - mostly about not making you check email twice.

Improved

• One-click re-sign-in. Once you've verified your email on this device, the Settings button changes from "Send link" to "Login" - click it and you're straight back in, no email round-trip.
• Onboarding wizard does the same: if you've signed in here before, it recognizes the device and skips the link step.

Launch

ABEL ships for the public. v0.2.0 is the first paid release and replaces every earlier 0.1.x build.

Pricing

• $1 of free credit on first sign-in - no card up front.
• $15 top-ups when you want more - one-time, no subscription, no recurring billing. About 165 chats / 50 cloud songs / 375 image generations per pack.
• Top up or sign out anytime from Settings → Account.

New

• Magic-link sign-in. Enter your email in Settings, click the link in your inbox, you're in. Cloud chat, image generation, and cloud song generation all run through your ABEL account.
• Onboarding wizard walks you through sign-in, AbletonOSC install, and optional local models on first launch.
• Custom titlebar - cleaner header, drag-to-move, no Windows chrome.
• Credit meter in Settings shows what's left of your pack as a 15-square strip.
• Heads-up banner when credits run low or hit zero, with a one-click top-up button.
• MiniMax Music 2.6 added to the Generate dropdown - full cloud song gen (vocals / auto-lyrics / instrumental). No download or load step.
• 10 extensions auto-install into Live on first launch: Bridge, Sampler, Arrange, CHOP, Generate, Pads, Wash, Warp, Master, Clone, Img2Midi.

Improved

• Cheaper chat. Light commands like "set tempo 128" or "mute track 3" now skip the LLM entirely - instant response, $0 cost. Long-running context (sample library, recent activity) only gets sent when your message references it.
• Faster first-launch. Connection status, sample-library scan, and bundled-extension install all moved off the critical path.
• Sharper UI. Brand pass across the welcome screen, capability cards, header, and onboarding.

Notes

• Local audio gen models (Foundation, Stable Audio 3, ACE-Step, MMAudio) are now packaged as a separate Extras Pack - the core installer drops from 3.5 GB to 108 MB. Settings will guide you to install Extras when you load a model that needs it.
• Mac build is not out yet.