BuildAble 12
User Manual

What BuildAble 12 does

A MultiTracks download is built for compatibility, not for your stage. It's a Live 8 session with the stems, a tempo map, and not much else. BuildAble 12 rebuilds it as a finished Live 12 song — click, spoken guide cues, sections, lyrics, routing, OSC — laid into your AbleSet template and ready to play.

What goes in

An unzipped MultiTracks.com download: a folder holding MultiTrack.als next to a MultiTracks folder of stems. Change nothing about it.

What comes out

A complete Ableton Live 12 project folder — the session, the stems copied in beside it, the album art, and your AbleSet data. Open it and play it. There is no "now finish the rest by hand" step.

The two-app pair

BuildAble 12 makes songs. StitchAble stitches them into a setlist. They share one engine and one sound library — the guide voice and click sounds you set up in one show up in the other, because they're the same files on disk.

It works in batches

Direct it at a folder of downloads and every song is listed. Adjust the ones that need it, leave the rest on defaults, and convert the whole Sunday in one pass — same lanes, same cues, same outputs, every song.

Install & activate

Two steps, once per Mac.

Before you start

• macOS, Apple Silicon or Intel.
• Ableton Live 12 to open the converted sessions.
• AbleSet — recommended. The sessions are built for it, but it isn't required to convert songs or to open them in Ableton.
• Your MultiTracks.com downloads, unzipped.

1 · Install

Open the DMG, drag BuildAble 12 to Applications, and launch it. It's Developer-ID signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a normal double-click.

2 · Activate

First launch shows the activation gate — the converter is locked until you activate, and there's no limited trial. Paste the license key from your purchase receipt and press Activate.

• The key is checked online once. After that the app runs offline, permanently.
• One license activates on 5 machines.
• Out of seats, reinstalling, or moving machines? Email the support address on the activation screen and a seat gets freed.

Setup — the free pack

BuildAble 12 builds a MIDI click and spoken guide cues. It needs sounds to build them from — and MultiTracks gives them away free.

Run setup

Open Settings (the gear, top-right) and press Set Up…. Point it at the downloaded Click and Guide Samples pack and it installs the voices and click sounds into your Ableton User Library.

Don't have the pack? Get the free pack in Settings opens the MultiTracks download page. Grab it, then run Set Up.

When it's done, Settings says the guides and clicks are installed and the button becomes Re-run Setup… with a green check.

Guide families

A family is a voice: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, or one you build yourself. Cues resolve strictly inside the chosen family, so a Spanish set can never pull an English word.

• Built-in cues live in the family's MAIN folder.
• Your own recordings go to _Imported — import one and it's available everywhere.

The main window

One window does the whole job: choose a folder, glance down the list, press Convert.

Control tracks up top · a card per song · OSC and Convert along the bottom

Header

• Choose Folder… — where your downloads are.
• ↻ Refresh — re-scans the folders you've already used and adds anything new.
• Clear — empties the list.
• Gear — Settings (Section 17).

Control tracks

The collapsible strip at the top decides which lanes get built, and what each one is called (Section 07). Set it once — it persists.

The song list

One card per detected song. Fill in what you want, open the Song Editor for the songs that need it, ignore the rest.

Footer

• Status line — what was found, what's converting, what happened.
• Output… — where converted songs get written.
• OSC — the global default command, the Library…, and the offset (Section 16).
• Convert to Live 12 — or ⌘↩.

Adding songs

Direct BuildAble 12 at a folder. It finds the downloads inside and ignores everything else.

What counts as a download

A folder containing MultiTrack.als sitting directly beside a MultiTracks folder of stems. That exact signature is how the app locks onto real downloads and leaves your other projects alone.

Adding them

• Choose Folder…, or drag a folder onto the list.
• If the folder is a download, it's added. If it isn't, the app looks one level down and adds every download it finds. It doesn't burrow deeper, and it skips hidden folders.
• Every folder you use is remembered. ↻ Refresh re-scans them and adds only what's new — download three more songs on Saturday, hit refresh, and there they are.

The song card

Each card is one song, and everything on it is editable before you convert.

What's on it

• Status icon — see below.
• The source folder name, in gray, so you can tell two versions of a song apart.
• Title · Artist · Key · BPM · Time — auto-filled where the download says, blank where it doesn't. Artist is left for you, because MultiTracks doesn't reliably say.
• Song Editor… — everything else about this song (Section 09).
• Summary chips — "2 lyric · 3 note · 7 cue" — what you've already set.
• Bottom line — the output folder name this song will get, previewed live as you type.

Status

Control tracks

These are the lanes BuildAble 12 builds into every song. Turn one off and it isn't there. Rename one and it's called whatever you called it.

Converting

Press Convert to Live 12 — or ⌘↩. If you haven't set an output folder, it asks for one.

What happens

• Every song that isn't already done builds. Finished ones are skipped.
• Each card goes working → done (with its output name) or failed (with the reason).
• You get a summary — "Converted 11 songs" — and Finder opens on the result.

Rebuilding a song

Changed a cue, fixed a key, re-routed a stem? Click that song's green check to re-arm it and press Convert. Only that song rebuilds.

The Song Editor

Everything about one song, in one window. Convert on defaults and never open it — or open it and shape the song exactly.

Metadata · no-shift stems · a per-song OSC command

• Metadata — title, artist, key, BPM, time signature.
• No-shift stems — percussion and loops, tagged [noshift] so a later key change in StitchAble leaves them alone. They're detected for you; the picker is there for the ones it can't guess (Section 01).
• Track names — rename the imported stems (Section 10).
• Per-song OSC — a command just for this song, overriding your global default (Section 16).
• Lyrics & Chords — the banner editor (Section 13).
• Section Notes — a director's note per section (Section 14).
• Guide Cues — review, re-label, audition, re-cut (Section 11).
• Returns — the routing patchbay (Section 15).

Everything you set is remembered against that song, so closing the editor and coming back loses nothing.

Renaming the tracks

MultiTracks names its stems the way MultiTracks names things. You probably don't call them that. Rename them once, by rule, and every song you ever convert comes out speaking your language.

The download's name on the left. Yours on the right. Blank keeps the original.

Per song

In the Song Editor, every imported stem is listed with a field beside it. Type what you want the track called in Live. Leave it blank and the original name stays — you only fill in the ones you care about.

By rule, for every song

Defaults… is the part that matters. Set up rules there and they auto-fill the names for every song you convert, so you're not retyping the same twenty stems every Sunday.

Names matter more than they look like they do: they're what you read on a dark stage, and they're what the routing rules match against when they decide which return a stem lands on (Section 15).

Guide cues

The +GUIDE lane is the most valuable thing BuildAble 12 builds, and the hardest. It's assembled in three layers — and they never collide, because the reliable ones always win.

Why it's layered

The count-in and the section cues come from things the song knows — its meter and its locators. Those can't be wrong. Performance cues come from listening to the guide stem, which is fuzzy by nature. So the skeleton is built from fact, and detection is only ever allowed to fill the gaps between. A section name can never be produced by detection, and nothing ever stacks on the same beat.

The count-in

Synthesized from the meter, in meter beats — six of them in 6/8, not four. The last bar names the section you're about to play, then counts you into the downbeat.

Section cues

One cue, one bar before each locator, named from the locator — and spelled the way your library spells it, so you hear "post chorus" and not the pad's abbreviation.

Performance cues

Only the spoken performance vocabulary: BUILD, DRUMS IN, HITS, ALL IN, SWELL, BREAKDOWN, TURNAROUND, VAMP, TAG. Two independent detectors find them:

• Audio fingerprint — the family's cue recordings matched against your song's guide stem. MultiTracks reuses the same recordings across songs, so the match is near-exact.
• On-device speech — the guide is transcribed and words are mapped to cues. Choose the engine in Settings: Off, Apple Speech (the default), or Whisper.

Anything spoken that still can't be named is surfaced as a blank slice for you to label — it isn't silently dropped.

The Guide Cues editor

46 cues, every one auditionable, re-cuttable, and re-labelable

Every cue is a row: play auditions that slice of the actual song, the position reads in bar.beat (2.2 = bar 2, beat 2 — the same way Ableton and AbleSet count), the dropdown picks the cue, the speaker plays the chosen sample so you can compare, and the status dot tells you where you stand:

• green — matched, with a sample to play.
• blue + — a custom cue. Tap it to save it into your library, and it'll match by itself next time.
• orange — heard, but unnamed. It needs you.

Re-detect runs the whole pass again.

The slice editor

Sometimes the guide says two things in one breath, and the detector hears one blob. The scissors button opens the waveform and lets you cut it yourself.

Drag the handles to trim · double-click to cut · hear each piece before you commit

• Drag the yellow end-handles to trim the front and back.
• Double-click the waveform to add a cut. Double-click a red line to remove one. Drag a cut to move it.
• Trim silence does the obvious thing automatically.
• Audition each piece before you commit.
• Apply splits the cue into those pieces.

Lyrics & chords

Type the words under each section and AbleSet shows them on the big screen. The structure is fixed for you, so you can't put the chorus in the wrong place.

Locked section banners · chords inline · and on the right, exactly what AbleSet will show

How the editor is built

• Section banners are locked. Every locator in the song appears as a full-width banner, in order. You can't add, remove, or reorder them — they mirror the arrangement exactly, because the arrangement is the truth.
• One box per section. Type that section's words in the box beneath its banner. The boxes grow as you type.
• Chords go inline in brackets: [G], or [1] for numbers.
• The chord palette under the editor holds the chords already used in this song — click one to drop it at the cursor.

Lanes, and the strip toggle

You can build more than one text lane. A Lyrics lane strips the [chords] out and shows plain words; a Numbers lane keeps them. Same typing, two lanes, two audiences — the singer and the band.

The preview is the real thing

The right-hand panel shows exactly how AbleSet will render the lane: section pills, chords floated over the right syllables, and overflow turned red when a line won't fit the screen. You'll know it's too long before you're on stage looking at it.

Section notes

A word to yourself, per section. full band. acapella. drums only.

One line per section. Blank is fine.

Edit them on the right of each lyrics banner, or in the Section Notes sheet — they're the same field. On convert they're appended to the section label:

Leave one blank and nothing is added. It's a small feature that survives contact with a real Sunday: the thing you'd otherwise be whispering across the stage is written on the screen.

Returns & routing

A return is a bus your stems send to. The return's output decides where that audio physically leaves the computer. The patchbay wires the two together.

Every stem, wired. Colored by the return it lands on.

• Rename any return, set its output, add or delete returns.
• Colored connectors show every stem's destination at a glance.
• Send each track to its own bus and output, or flow them all through one — whatever your rig needs.

Defaults do the work

Every new song starts from a global template, so you set this up once rather than per song:

• The default return is TRACKS +G:TRACKS → Ext. Out 5/6.
• Routing rules can send stems to a return by name — KEYS _ catches KEYS 1, KEYS 2, and so on (_ is a number wildcard).
• Anything unmatched lands on the first return. Nothing gets orphaned.

Click, Guide, and Tracks each have their own global output in Settings — by default Ext 7, Ext 8, and Ext 5/6.

OSC commands

AbleSet can be told what to do by a clip name. BuildAble 12 builds those clips for you, so a song can start its own loop, set its own tempo, or fire a notification when it hits a section.

How it works

An OSC lane holds clips whose names are messages. AbleSet reads the name and fires it. Chain several with semicolons:

• The global default, in the footer, applies to every new song.
• Per song, in the Song Editor, overrides it.
• The OSC Command Library is a searchable catalog of 50+ built-in AbleSet commands — playback, loop, setlist, lyrics, mixer, interface, UI, notify, MIDI, devices — plus My Commands, the ones you save. Click one to append it, edit the arguments, save it.
• Offset nudges when the clip fires relative to the beat. Default 0.125.

Both fields type-ahead, so you don't have to remember the syntax.

Settings

The gear, top-right. Set this up once and every song you ever convert inherits it.

Setup · MT Guide · MT Click · Output routing · AbleSet

Setup

Set Up… / Re-run Setup… installs the free pack (Section 03), with a link to get it if you don't have it.

MT Guide

• Family — the voice. Cues resolve strictly within it.
• Cue Library… — browse and play every cue you own. Add Cue… imports your own recording into that family, and it's available everywhere from then on.
• Order Cues… — the display order. Inside it, Reorder drum rack… permutes the actual pad notes (it asks first, and it applies to future conversions).
• Build Test Set — a session that plays every cue you own, in order. Ten seconds to hear your whole voice.
• Cue detection — Off (audio match only), Apple Speech (the default), or Whisper (an on-device model, downloaded on first use). If Whisper isn't available it falls back to Apple Speech on its own.

MT Click

Per pad — accent, quarter, eighth, sixteenth — pick the sound and the pitch (±24 semitones). Show click folder opens the folder so you can drop your own clicks in.

Output routing

Click (Ext 7), Guide (Ext 8), Tracks (Ext 5/6) — Master, or any external mono out or stereo pair.

AbleSet

Choose an AbleSet template folder and it's copied into every song you convert. This is what makes a converted song open ready for your rig rather than ready for a blank Ableton.

What gets built

Everything below is written into the session, from the download plus what you set.

What it reads

• The folder name → title, key, BPM.
• The Live 8 session → the tempo map, the meter map, the section locators, the stem order.
• The MultiTracks folder → the stems. A guide stem and a click stem are recognized and treated specially.

What it writes

• SONG TITLE, TEMPO and TIME SIG — labels plus the master automation that actually drives the song.
• CLICK — meter-aware, per tempo and meter segment, on your click output, playing the sounds and pitches you chose.
• SECTIONS +CC — a colored label per section, plus arrangement locators.
• +GUIDE / +LOOPGUIDE — the three cue layers (Section 11).
• OSC, Lyrics, Numbers — if you enabled them.
• The stems — one track each, grouped, [noshift] where tagged, sending to the returns you set.

The output folder

A self-contained project folder. Move it, back it up, hand it to someone — it works.

Inside the project folder is the .als, Ableton's project info, and your AbleSet data if you set a template.

That folder name is also exactly what StitchAble reads: title, artist, key, BPM, meter. Convert here, and the song is already named the way the setlist builder wants it.

Troubleshooting

Most of what looks wrong is the app telling you something.