What's new in BuildAble 12

Changed

• The control tracks panel reads properly now. The four locked lanes, Song Title, Tempo, Time Sig, and Sections, are pinned as a block on top, and the ones you can actually change, Click, Guide, Loop Guide, Jump Guide, and Lyrics, sit under a divider. They used to intermix across the wrapped rows, so what was fixed and what was yours took a moment to work out.

Fixed

• The Band waveform is the instruments only. Click and guide were bleeding into the mixdown on songs opened from the Song Library or built by hand. They stay out of it now and play on their own lanes, so what you hear while you're laying out a song is the band.

New

• Review the chart against the original. On a PDF import, turn on Original and the source chart sits beside the parsed text. Move the cursor and the PDF turns to the page that line came off. Repeated choruses go to the right copy, not always the first one.
• A warnings box on import. Anything questionable is flagged with its location, so a quick import can't slip a bad chord past you.
• It remembers where you were. BuildAble reopens the folder you last worked in, with already-converted songs flagged in their own group, and Choose Folder… starts there instead of at the top of your drive.

Fixed

• Sharps and flats now come in correctly from a chart. Chart Pro draws accidentals as small graphics rather than text, which is why they used to come in wrong. BuildAble reads them off the page now, in sharp keys and flat keys, in letters, Nashville numbers, Roman numerals, and DoReMi, and it holds up on the complicated ones like 7#9#5 and maj9#11. It doesn't guess: a chord it can't read cleanly gets flagged instead of faked.
• Cleaner imports. Section headers, page numbers, and bar-count markers are handled properly instead of leaking in as chords.

New

• Rename tracks and edit returns from the Song Library. Open a finished song, rename its tracks or re-route its returns (add and remove returns too), and Apply writes it straight back into the session. It backs the song up first, and uses the same routing the converter does.
• A pageable song view. The Library detail keeps the arrangement pinned while you page through sections and cues, a returns patchbay, track names, and collapsible lyric lanes.

Changed

• First update delivered in-app. If you are on 1.1.0, this one arrives through Check for Updates.

New

• The Song Library. Manage a whole set, not just one conversion. Load a folder of built sessions and every song shows its sections, cues, click pads, guide and click families, and lane state at a glance. Open any song back in the editor, change it, and apply the change straight to the .als.
• Make consistent. The Library finds guide drum-rack drift, clips firing the wrong pad, click-sound mismatches, and missing media, then normalizes a whole library onto one layout. Mark as same remembers a cue alias across every song.
• Custom OSC and MIDI control lanes. Add your own lanes to the Sections timeline and place cues on them. An OSC-named lane loads AbleSet's command catalog on its own, so the commands are there to pick rather than to remember.
• A graphical CC editor. Draw a CC envelope with as many breakpoints as you want, option-drag a segment to curve it, ramp over a number of bars, put several controllers in one clip, and snap to the 16th or the bar. It all becomes real automation in the built session.
• AbleSet Cues mode. Let AbleSet's own Cues plugin speak the cues instead of the drum-rack guide. Section count-ins come from the SECTIONS locators, performance cues become a /cues/say lane, and you either let AbleSet generate the voice or hand it a WAV family so it speaks in the voice you already use. A whole library converts to Cues mode in one pass.
• Lyric timing comes back. Open a finished song and its lyrics and per-line timing load back in, so you can keep editing instead of starting over. Time Lyrics also gained Re-time from here, Copy timing from another lane or section, the [>] pickup marker, and 16th-note snapping.
• It updates itself. A version badge next to the title checks for updates when you click it, and it checks quietly in the background too. Signed updates install once you approve them. Coming from 1.0.x, grab this one from the site by hand, since the older builds have no updater in them; everything after 1.1.0 arrives on its own.
• Import a family from a zip, not just a folder, with the vendor detected for you. Families sit in collections shown as nested menus, so a long list stays readable.

Changed

• The guide rack was rebuilt. The guide is now one Live-authored 128-pad rack that BuildAble repoints to your family, so every callout plays in full and lands on the pad it is supposed to.
• Faster play and scrub on the Sections timeline, from a single cached stereo mixdown instead of mixing the stems every time.
• Hover the waveform and it tells you which section you are over.
• Songs saved by an older Ableton are flagged in the Library and blocked from editing until you re-save them in Live 12, so one old song cannot quietly break a mixed library.

Changed

• A safer Clear. Clearing no longer throws away work without warning.
• Cleaner Settings layout, so the options are easier to find.

Fixed

• More robust guide-cue detection, catching cues it used to miss.

Changed

• Smarter import. BuildAble finds MultiTracks downloads even when they are nested deeper in a folder, and reads the .als first so the session drives the import.

New

• Free trial. Five full conversions with nothing held back, then a Gumroad license key unlocks unlimited conversions in the app you already have.

New

• Import chords and lyrics from a chart. Pull the words and chords out of a chart PDF or pasted text instead of typing them. Reads MultiTracks Chart Pro in letters, Nashville numbers, Roman numerals, or solfege, plus SongSelect and plain text charts, with each chord placed above the syllable it falls on.
• Apply to lanes. Send one chart to several lyric lanes at once, or import separate PDFs into their matching lanes. Lanes that already have content are flagged before anything is replaced.
• Section notes from the chart. Chart Pro performance cues drop into each section's Note, and notes you already wrote are never overwritten.

Changed

• Much faster waveforms, rendered in parallel and cached, so the editor stops making you wait.
• A snappier click, and a per-song click nudge for when a song sits a hair off.

Fixed

• Compressed stems no longer sit behind the click.

New

• Import your own click, either building a tempo map from the hits or normalizing to one steady BPM and warping the stems to match.
• Import a guide on the Sections page.
• Guide and click now ship with the app, so there is no setup step before your first song.
• Downloads unzip themselves.

New

• Convert one song at a time, rather than only in batches.
• Guide voice families, with Jessa bundled and Import Family… for your own.
• Voice-fingerprint cue matching.
• Editor upgrades: zoom, section bands, the guide-stem strip, color-coded cues, and the ability to hear the original guide.

First public release

• MultiTracks to Ableton Live 12 conversion.
• Song Editor with automatic guide-cue detection and a waveform split editor.
• Lyrics and chords editor with a live AbleSet preview, plus Time Lyrics.
• Returns patchbay.
• Gumroad licensing.