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. Or you might not have a download at all, just a folder of stems you bounced yourself. Either way in, BuildAble 12 builds a finished Live 12 song, click, spoken guide cues, sections, lyrics, and routing, laid into your AbleSet template and ready to play.

What goes in

Two kinds of input, and the app treats them as equals:

• An unzipped MultiTracks.com download: a folder holding MultiTrack.als next to a MultiTracks folder of stems. Change nothing about it.
• A plain folder of stems, wav, aif, m4a, mp3, and other common audio formats, with no session at all. You lay the arrangement out yourself (Section 06).

What you can edit, by input

The two inputs build the same finished song. The one real difference is who owns the tempo and meter, the download brings its own and locks them; on a folder of stems you set everything.

What comes out

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

It comes out in one particular shape, and that is on purpose. The folder name, the lane names, the way the stems sit with the session, all of it is a format that AbleSet, StitchAble, and the Song Library read directly. BuildAble decides those things so that nothing downstream has to guess, and so the same song still makes sense to the tools a year from now. Section 24 lays out exactly what's fixed and what each fixed thing buys you.

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, same lanes, same cues, same outputs, every song.

Install, try, activate

Install it and start converting. The first five conversions are free, and nothing is held back in them.

Before you start

• macOS 14.6 or later, Apple Silicon or Intel.
• Ableton Live 12 to open the converted sessions. Live 12 is what BuildAble writes, it's required to open a converted song, though not to run the conversion itself.
• AbleSet, recommended. The sessions are built for it, but it isn't required to convert songs or to open them in Ableton. AbleSet Cues mode (Section 15) is the one feature that assumes it.
• Your MultiTracks.com downloads, unzipped, or a folder of stems.

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 · Convert five songs free

There is no gate on first launch. Convert straight away and you get five full conversions, real finished Live 12 sessions with nothing watermarked, disabled, or held back. The header shows Demo · N left so you always know where you stand.

One thing the demo does limit besides the count: the Song Library (Section 25) shows only the first 10 songs it finds until the app is activated. It still loads the folder, you just see ten of them, with a banner offering to activate. Activate and the rest appear right away.

3 · Activate when you're ready

Buy a license and you get a key on your receipt. Click Demo · N left in the header, or just try to convert past the fifth song, then paste the license key and press Activate for unlimited conversions.

• The key is checked online once. After that the app runs offline, permanently.
• Each purchase includes 5 activations, enough for the studio Mac, the stage Mac, and the spare.
• The conversions you made during the demo stay exactly where they are. Nothing to redo.
• Reinstalling, or moving machines? Send me a message.
• No key yet? Buy BuildAble 12 on the same screen opens the store page.
• Not sure which copy is which? About BuildAble 12 in the app menu says whether this one is activated, or how many trial conversions are left.

Setup and sounds

BuildAble 12 builds a MIDI click and spoken guide cues, and it comes with the sounds to build them from. There is nothing to download before your first song.

What ships with it

The click sounds and the spoken guide voices install with the app. Activate it and you can convert a song straight away, with a click that plays and cues that speak.

Adding your own

Open Settings (the gear, top-right). In the Cues card, Add Pack… brings more in: From a Folder or Zip… for a family of recordings, the free MultiTracks Click and Guide Samples pack included if you want those exact recordings, or a folder of your own; From a Drum Rack… for a guide rack you already have, imported as a family of its own. Everything lands in your Ableton User Library under StitchCore, and the Ableton User Library card shows where that is, read from Ableton's own preferences, with Choose… to direct it somewhere else and Show to open it.

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.
• Import Family… takes a folder or a zip, and works out who the voice came from rather than making you say. The family manager creates, adds to, and replaces families.
• Families can sit in collections, shown as nested submenus that are built from the names you give them, so a long list stays readable. Import files a voice away for you, and you can organize your own.

The main window

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

Control tracks up top · a card per song · your output folder along the bottom

Header

• Choose Folder…, where your downloads are. BuildAble remembers this folder, so next launch it reopens and re-scans it and your list is where you left it. Songs you already converted come back flagged, in their own Already converted group, read from their song cards. Choose Folder… opens at your last location rather than at the top of your drive.
• ↻ Refresh, re-scans the folders you've already used and adds anything new.
• Clear, empties the list.
• Gear, Settings (Section 22).

Control tracks

The collapsible strip at the top decides what each built lane is called, and which of the few optional lanes you want. The structural lanes are always built, you can't turn them off (Section 08). 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. Each card has its own Convert button, so you build a song when it's ready rather than all at once (Section 09).

Footer

• Status line, what was found, what's converting, what happened.
• Output…, where converted songs get written, with the current folder shown beside it.

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.

Create a song from stems

No MultiTracks session? Fine. Direct BuildAble 12 at a plain folder of audio and it builds the same finished Live 12 song. The difference is that you lay the arrangement out, instead of a download doing it for you.

Create New Song… on the main window opens a folder picker. Choose a folder of stems, wav, aif, m4a, mp3, and other common audio formats, and it lists as a manual song card alongside your downloads, with the Song Editor already open on it. Dropping a folder of stems on the window does the same, and a folder of stem folders makes one song each. Title, BPM, key, and meter start from the folder name and your defaults, and every one of them is editable in the Song Editor.

What is different

On a download the tempo map and the meters are baked in and locked, because they came from the file. On a manual song you own all of it. Tempo, time signatures, sections, count-in, and cues are yours to set on the Sections timeline (Section 12).

What is the same

The Tracks tab, Lyrics, and Section Notes behave exactly as they do for a download. The build reads your audio straight from the folder you chose and lays it into the same AbleSet template. Nothing about the output is second class.

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 10).
• 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. The structural ones are always there, that's the format. What you control here is what each lane is called, the mode a couple of them build in, and the handful that are genuinely optional.

How the panel is laid out

The four locked structural lanes, Song Title, Tempo, Time Sig, and Sections, sit pinned as a block along the top. Everything you can actually change about a build, Click, Guide, Loop Guide, Jump Guide, and Lyrics, sits below a divider. What's fixed and what's yours is a glance, not a read.

Converting

Each song card has its own Convert button. It opens the Song Editor, so you look the song over first, and the editor ends on a pulsing BUILD button. Press it and that song builds, the editor closes, and the card turns green when it's done. If you haven't set an output folder, the app asks for one first.

What happens

• The song you converted builds. Songs already marked done are skipped, so a second pass over the list doesn't rebuild everything.
• The card goes working → done (with its output name) or failed (with the reason).
• You get a summary line, and Finder opens on the result.

Rebuilding a song

Changed a cue, fixed a key, re-routed a stem? Open that song's editor and press BUILD AGAIN, or click its green check to re-arm it. Only that song rebuilds. Close at the top of the editor leaves without building, and your edits stay.

Your work in progress is saved as you go

Setting up a song is real work, and losing it to a crash is the kind of thing that makes you not want to do it again. So it doesn't get lost. Edits autosave into the song's own folder while you work: when you change tabs, when you close it, and every five minutes regardless. If that folder is read-only, the draft goes to Application Support instead.

• An Edited badge on the card tells you there's unconverted work in there.
• If the app goes down, the work is waiting when you open the song again.
• The draft clears itself once the song converts, so it doesn't pile up.

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 · don't transpose · tracks

• Metadata, title, artist, key, BPM, time signature, and tags.
• Guide, how this song speaks its cues: Audio (its own guide stem, greyed out when the song has none), Drum Rack, or AbleSet Cues. Until you pick one, the song follows the Guide switch on the main screen.
• Don't transpose, percussion and loops, tagged [noshift] so a later key change in StitchAble leaves them alone. They're detected for you; the list is there for the ones it can't guess (Section 01).
• Tracks, one row per track: mute it, color it, rename it, and pick the return it sends to (Section 11 and Section 19).
• Lyrics & Chords, the banner editor (Section 17).
• Section Notes, a director's note per section (Section 18).
• Guide Cues, review, re-label, audition, re-cut (Section 14).

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

The Song tab

Metadata, the Don't transpose list, and a mute per click pad

Two things here are worth knowing. Don't transpose (it used to say No-shift stems) is a folding list of checkboxes, straight down, in two columns when a song has more than 8 stems, with a count when it's folded. A checked stem keeps its pitch when StitchAble changes the song's key, so only pitched instruments move. Drums and percussion start checked, and it's the same [noshift] tag as before. And the sixteenth click pad is muted by default, because most songs do not want sixteenths ticking away. Tick it when a song needs them.

Tags

The Tags row, under key, BPM and time, takes words like worship, fast or #Worship #Fast, the # optional. They're saved with the song's card and show under the artist in the Library, which has a search box and a Tags menu of its own; StitchAble shows them too. Leave the row alone and a rebuild keeps the tags the song already has. In the Library, change a tag and press Apply. New in 1.3.1.

Tags can be part of a song's name too: type Cadenas #Rock as the title and the tags go into the folder and session names just as you typed them, the way AbleSet's multi-file setlists read them. BuildAble never adds tags to a name on its own. Tags in a name show in light blue after the title, in the Library and in StitchAble, and card tags on the line under the artist. Tags in the title locator, beside the Tags row, is on by default. Off, the song's title locator leaves its tags out, and so does its SONG TITLE lane while Song name lane matches the title is on in Settings. StitchAble honors each song's choice. New in 1.3.2.

The Color dot beside it picks the song's color in AbleSet. Click it, pick one of AbleSet's colors or No color, then press Apply. The color goes in the song's title locator, which is where AbleSet reads it, the song is backed up first, and the file name stays as it is. It stays through a rebuild, and StitchAble shows it and carries it into your sets. If you change a song's color while it's open in Live, close it there without saving, or Live's copy will write over it.

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.

The Tracks tab

Track Names and Returns used to be two tabs. They're one tab now, Tracks, and every track gets one row: a speaker button to mute it in Live, its color swatch (click it to pick any of Ableton's 70 colors), its name, and the return it sends to, with the colored lines to the returns on the right (Section 19). It works for a new song, and for a finished song opened from the Library, where Apply writes the mutes, colors, names and routing back. New in 1.3.3.

Per song

On the Tracks tab, every imported stem is listed with its name in a field. Type over it with 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

Name Rules… (it used to say 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 19).

Rules run on import, first match wins

The Sections timeline

A tempo-aware, zoomable timeline that plays every stem together, so you lay the song out by listening to it rather than guessing at numbers.

The whole arrangement in one view: waveform, sections, cues, playhead

It serves both kinds of song. What you can change depends on where the song came from.

Playback and transport

Play, Click, Guide, Follow, zoom

• Play or scrub the full stem mix. The playhead locks to the beat, quarter notes for x/4 and eighths for x/8.
• Playback is sample-locked. Stems, click, and guide all start on one shared clock, so nothing drifts against anything else.
• Click and Guide play along with the mix using the exact sounds you picked in Settings. Both are rendered in the background the moment the editor opens, so switching them on is instant instead of a wait.
• Follow keeps the playhead centered while you play. Scroll away and it turns itself off. Press it again to snap back.
• Zoom stretches the timeline from 1x to 16x.
• Hover the waveform and it tells you which section you're over, without having to look up at the markers.
• The playhead runs through every lane, not just the waveform, so you can see where you are against the cues as well as the audio.
• Right-click a lane to add a cue right there.
• The original guide strip sits under the main waveform, where you can tap it to hear what the download actually said.
• Play and scrub run off a single cached stereo mixdown rather than mixing every stem each time, so the timeline stays quick on a twenty-stem song.
• The Band waveform is the instruments only. Click and guide stay out of that mixdown and play on their own lanes, so what you see and hear is the band, not the band plus a click on top of it. That holds however the song got here, converted, built by hand, or opened out of the Library.

Detail scales with the zoom, so it stays crisp close in and clean far out

Sections

Add at the playhead, from the standard list or a name of your own

Add a section at the playhead from the standard list, Intro, Verse 1, Chorus, Bridge, Ending, or type your own. Reorder by beat, relabel, delete, and nudge any section to an exact beat position. The names and colors here are what drive the SECTIONS lane and its clips in the built song.

The palette is Ableton's own, in Ableton's own order, so what you see here is what opens in Live

Pick a color for a section and that's the color its clip has in Live. A section you don't pick keeps its usual color, and a name BuildAble doesn't know shows the pink it builds with.

Count-in

Manual songs only, since a download brings its own beginning.

One, two or four bars, and optionally before the song starts

• One bar, two, or four, your call. Four is two bars of click, then the usual ONE, TWO and the count into the song.
• Place it before the song and it becomes a real lead-in on negative beats, so the count does not eat into your first bar.
• The spoken ONE, TWO, section name, and count are generated for you, and the count-in shows up as its own section clip.
• With no section at the song's downbeat (no sections at all, say), the count bar opens on ONE instead of silence.

Cues

Section callouts land one bar before each section. Performance cues go in wherever the playhead is. Both appear as ticks under the waveform that expand to the full label when you hover. Drag one to move it, relabel or delete it from its context menu, and if two would land on top of each other you get a warning rather than a mess.

White, a section callout

Green, matched. Red, heard but unmatched

Orange, matched but not for certain

Drag to move, with a warning if two would collide

The click stops an eighth-note into the ENDING section, so it gets out of the way of the last chord instead of ticking through it.

Time-signature changes

Snapped to the bar, driving the grid, the click, and the build

On a manual song, add a change at the playhead and it snaps to the bar. It drives the grid, the click subdivisions, and the build. On a download, meter changes come from the source and sit on the grid as read-only markers.

Your own lanes, on the same timeline

The lanes above are the ones BuildAble builds for you. You can also add your own OSC and MIDI lanes here and place cues on them, with drawn CC envelopes if you want them. Section 21 covers that in full.

Import a click or guide

Have the click track for the song? Then do not type a tempo. Hand BuildAble 12 the file and let it work the map out from the hits.

Both live on the Sections timeline, and both are for manual songs, where the tempo is not already decided for you.

Import tempo or click, and Import guide

Import tempo or click

Pick the file, say what the click is counting, then choose how the song sits on the grid

• Pick a click file, or use the one BuildAble finds in the folder.
• Say whether the click is counting quarter notes or eighths. It cannot know this by listening, and getting it wrong halves or doubles your tempo.
• It builds a tempo map from the hits, then tells you what it found: how many hits, and the average BPM. A steady click reads as the whole number (type 123 and you get 123, not 122.99). A click that slows for its ending is named by the tempo it spends most of its time at, and a folder name shows two decimals at most.
• Where bar 1 starts. The click's waveform, with every hit it found marked. Click the hit that's the song's first downbeat, or step with the arrows, zoom in, and Listen. Anything before it, silence or a count, is left out, and the tempo and every stem line up from there. It starts on the first hit.
• Getting around the waveform. The zoom slider runs zoomed out on the left and in on the right. Swipe with two fingers to scroll, pinch to zoom, or drag the waveform to scroll. A time ruler runs along the bottom, and the numbers by the scroll bar show what's on screen ("0:12.4 to 0:18.4 of 3:36"), with the bar 1 position on its own line below.
• Lining bar 1 up exactly. Drag the yellow bar 1 line anywhere you like. Let go close to a hit and it snaps to it. It shows how many ms it sits off the hit, and Snap to Hit puts it back. Sliding it moves the whole grid, so the tempo stays the click's.
• Listen with the band plays your stems from bar 1 with the click as the song will get it: your Settings click sounds following the tempo it read. Switch to The click file to hear the file itself against the stems instead.

Then choose how the song should sit on the grid.

Warp modes

Normalize only, since nothing is warped when you map to the click.

One algorithm per stem, or Set all at once

Choose the algorithm per stem: Beats, Tones, Texture, Re-Pitch, Complex, or Complex Pro. Complex is the default. Complex Pro suits vocals and full mixes, Beats suits drums and anything percussive. Set all… applies one choice to every track at once.

Import guide

The guide sits under the timeline with its cues detected against your sections

Pick a guide file, or let BuildAble read the one named Guide in the stem folder. Its waveform appears under the timeline and its cues are detected against the song's sections and tempo, exactly the way a MultiTracks guide is, see Section 14.

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.

On a finished song

Open a song from the Library and the guide lane's ticks say what the check found, in the same colours, with one difference: green there means confirmed, or placed by hand and never spoken by the guide, and orange is the guide speaking something the matcher cannot place, an unknown voice. That is exactly what Teach this voice on the cue, or learn N from this guide on the strip, will teach. Teaching works the way Learn every voice does: a recording BuildAble already knows is skipped, and each cue keeps at most six, so teaching the same song twice doesn't pile up copies. The strip counts confirmed, section cues and unmatched separately, rather than as one fraction, because "16 of 30" read as half wrong when fourteen of them were callouts the guide never announces.

Where you see them

Cues live on the Sections timeline now, not in a separate sheet. Every detected cue is a tick under the waveform, colored by how certain the match is, and you drag, relabel, or delete it right there against the audio you are listening to. Section 12 covers the timeline in full.

Choosing the detection engine

Settings, Cues: pick how hard it listens

Whisper used to be the slow choice. It is not now. Transcription is chunked by voice activity, so the silent stretches of a guide stem are skipped and the spoken chunks are transcribed in parallel, and the model pre-loads in the background as soon as you select it, so your first run is not the download and compile hit. If speech is unavailable for any reason, detection falls back to the audio match on its own, without asking.

How the lane actually plays

The guide is one Live-authored 128-pad drum rack that BuildAble repoints at whichever family you chose. One rack, one layout, every song. That's what makes a callout play in full instead of getting clipped, and land on the pad it's supposed to instead of the pad next door. It's also what the Library's Make consistent checks against when it looks for drift.

Make New Cue

When the detector hears something it has no recording for, you don't have to go and record one. Right-click the Sections waveform, or right-click the cue itself if it came up red or orange, and Make New Cue. Name it, crop it, and it's imported into your voice family and placed on the timeline in one go.

The next song that says the same thing matches it without asking.

AbleSet Cues mode

The other way to get spoken cues. Instead of BuildAble assembling a drum-rack guide, AbleSet's own Cues plugin speaks them, and the build hands it what to say.

Turn it on in Settings ▸ Cues. Everything else about the song is unchanged: same click, same sections, same lyrics, same routing. Only the guide layer is built differently.

What changes in the built song

The voice

Two choices, and you can change your mind later:

• Generate, and AbleSet speaks the phrases in its own voice. Nothing to install.
• A WAV family, one of yours. The family's recordings are copied into <Project>/AbleSet/Cues/Custom/, so the plugin speaks in the voice your band already knows. Anything the family doesn't have a recording for falls back to the generated voice rather than going silent.

Converting a library you already built

You don't have to rebuild your songs by hand. Direct the conversion at a whole library and it moves every song over in one pass, with a progress overlay while it works.

Phrases that have no matching WAV stop and ask, once, in a match-or-add sheet: pick an existing recording from the family or import one. What you pick is remembered as a family-wide alias, so the same phrase in the next forty songs goes through without asking 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 crop the part you actually want.

The whole phrase, with the quiet around it · drag the yellow handles to crop

• You see the whole phrase, with the quiet either side of it, so you can tell where the words actually start and stop.
• Drag the yellow handles to take in more or crop down to just the spoken part.
• Trim silence does the obvious thing automatically.
• Play it before you commit, then Use crop.

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, and the preview hides them too, so the lane looks exactly like the finished session; 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.

Import from a chart

Rather than typing, you can pull the words and chords straight out of a chart. New in 1.0.4.

The Import button sits at the bottom of the track list, and on the empty-state screen when a song has no lyrics yet. Two ways in:

• From PDF or text file… for a chart PDF or a plain-text chart.
• Paste chart text for something you have already copied.

Either way a review window opens first. Nothing touches your song until you press Import, and everything in that window is editable, so you fix problems before they land rather than after.

What it reads

• MultiTracks Chart Pro, in letters, Nashville numbers, Roman numerals, or DoReMi solfege. Chords are placed above the exact word or syllable they fall on.
• SongSelect number and chord charts.
• Your own text charts, using a simple {Section} and [chord] format. There is a "Make your own chart" help panel in the import window.
• Lyrics-only and chords-only exports.
• Song maps, which come in as section notes and nothing else.

Sharps and flats come in exactly right

Chart Pro doesn't put accidentals in the page as text. It draws them as tiny graphics. That's why chart imports used to get them wrong, and it's fixed in 1.1.2: BuildAble reads them straight off the page and puts the right # or b on the chord.

It works in sharp keys and flat keys, in every notation, and it holds up on the complicated ones, F#m9, E/G#, 7#9#5, maj9#11, Nashville b7.

The warnings box

Anything questionable is listed with its location, so a fast import can't slip a bad chord past you. Read the list, fix what needs fixing in the text pane, then import.

The original, right beside it

On a PDF import, turn on Original and the source chart sits next to the parsed text. Move the cursor and the PDF turns to the page that line came off, so checking a chord is a glance rather than a hunt.

Repeated lines go to the right copy too. Put the cursor in the last chorus and you get the last chorus, not the first one that happens to match.

Choosing where it goes

The review window lists every lyric lane in the song as a checkbox, so tick each lane the chart should fill. One chart can feed several lanes at once, or you can import separate PDFs, lyrics, chords, and numbers, into their matching lanes. You can also create a new Lyrics, Chords, or Numbers lane right there. Any lane that already has content is flagged, because importing replaces it.

On a MultiTracks download, your sections win

A download already carries the correct sections, so import matches the chart to them and fills in the gaps. Section headers are read in the song's own guide voice, the same one the Sections editor uses, so a Spanish song's chart lines up with VERSO and CORO. Section names and arrangement stay exactly as they are; the chart only supplies words and chords. Sections match by name, and a number doesn't get in the way: a chart that just says Verse fills your Verse 1 and Verse 2 in order, and a chart's Verse 1 and Verse 2 fill a song that just says Verse.

Section notes, filled in for you

Chart Pro prints performance cues beside each section, things like "Piano line," "Breakdown," or "Build with energy." Turn on Fill empty section notes from the chart in the review window and those land in each section's Note. Notes you have already written are never overwritten.

Song info

On a manual song, import can also set the tempo, time signature, and key from the chart. On a MultiTracks download those are left alone, since the download is the source of truth. Title and artist are only filled in when they are blank.

Time Lyrics

Words on the screen are better when they arrive when they're sung. Time Lyrics plays the song and you tap along, one tap per line, and that's the timing.

Play, tap once per line, and the bar chips fill in

Turn on Click in the sheet and it plays the same click the built song carries: the Settings sounds and pitches per pad, this song's pad mutes, every tempo and meter change, stopping an eighth note into ENDING. Marks land where you heard the line, not where the playhead was drawn, and a Tap offset stepper takes off your own reaction time, remembered between sessions. Clicking a line's bar chip seeks to it; Set to playhead is in the menu, so a stray double-click cannot rewrite a line's timing.

• Re-time from here, when the first half is right and the second half isn't. You don't redo the whole lane to fix the last chorus.
• Copy timing from another section or another lane. The line counts don't have to match, so the numbers lane can borrow the lyrics lane's timing.
• A blank line is a stop, a held gap where nothing should be showing.
• The [>] pickup marker for a line that starts before the bar does.
• Snapping to the 16th note, autoscroll with the current line highlighted, and right-click to clear one line's timing without touching the rest.

Copy text, or pull another lane across section for section

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 right side of the Tracks tab 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.
• Master isn't offered as a return output. The template's Main goes out 7/8, so a return on Master came out 7/8 and sounded like nothing. A return already saved on Master still shows and builds the same.

Places you play

Play more than one room? Each place keeps its own returns and routing rules. Return Rules… (it used to say Places…) on the Tracks tab is where you set them up: its window is titled Return Rules, and the menu at the top adds, renames and deletes places. Apply Return Rules (it used to say Apply Default Returns) puts the current place's returns on the song in one click, and its arrow picks another place. Every new song starts with the current place's, so you set this up once rather than per song:

• The first place is called Main, rename it to your church. Its return is TRACKS +G:TRACKS → Ext. Out 5/6.
• A new place starts as a copy of the one you're on, so you only change what's different.
• 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 output. The click's is in the Click card in Settings and the guide's in the Cues card, by default Ext. Out 3 and Ext. Out 7, and the default TRACKS return goes to Ext. Out 5/6.

OSC commands

AbleSet can be told what to do by a clip name. BuildAble 12 lets you build those clips, so a song can start its own loop, set its own tempo, or fire a notification when it hits a section. In 1.1 this lives entirely in the custom lanes, there is no separate OSC panel any more.

How it works

OSC is authored as a lane on the Sections timeline. Add a lane, name it as OSC, and it becomes a lane whose clip names are messages. AbleSet reads the name and fires it. Chain several with semicolons:

• Name a lane as OSC and it loads AbleSet's command catalog on its own, so the commands are there to choose from rather than to remember.
• The command catalog is a searchable list of 50+ built-in AbleSet commands, playback, loop, setlist, lyrics, mixer, interface, UI, notify, MIDI, devices, plus the ones you save. Choose one to drop it into a clip, then edit the arguments.
• Place a clip wherever you want the message to fire, exactly the way you place any other cue on the timeline.

Section 21 covers building lanes, placing clips, and the CC editor in full, OSC is just one kind of lane you can add there. The commands the autofill knows about are managed in Settings (Section 22), and you can teach it new ones from AbleSet's own documentation.

OSC lives on the Sections timeline now: an OSC lane, with Library and Add cue beside it

Custom control lanes

The built-in lanes cover what most songs need. When they don't, build your own: an OSC or MIDI lane of your making, sitting on the Sections timeline next to everything else.

Adding a lane

Add a lane and name it. It sits on the timeline with the others, and its Add cue drops at the playhead then steps by the spacing you set. Two lanes can share a name if that's what makes sense to you.

Right-click the lane and you get everything you can put on it:

Right-click a lane for what goes on it

Writing an OSC command

Choose OSC… and you get a field you can type anything into. Start with / and it autofills from every command it knows about, so you pick rather than remember.

Type a slash and the list comes up · chain several with a semicolon

Chain several with a semicolon and the plugin runs them in order, so one cue can do a few things at once: /loop/enable; /global/play.

The Clip Library

The commands you actually use, you use over and over. Save one to the Clip Library and it's a menu pick on every lane in every song from then on, instead of something you retype.

Save a command once · pick it from From library on any lane after that

A clip is a name, a MIDI message, or both, and which part does the work depends on the lane it lands on:

• A name-only clip acts as an OSC command when the lane's name ends in +OSC. That naming is what makes the lane an OSC lane, so it matters.
• A note fires into the lane's MIDI output. You route that in Ableton once the song is built, the same as any other MIDI track.
• A CC envelope can be saved here too. Draw it once, save it, and drop it on any lane in any song after that instead of drawing it again.

The CC editor

Any cue on a lane can hold a drawn CC envelope, not just a single value.

• As many breakpoints as you want, dragged where you want them.
• Option-drag a segment to curve it, a real bezier, up to plus or minus 300 percent, so a fade can ease in instead of running straight.
• Ramps over N bars, when you'd rather say how long than draw it.
• Several controllers in one clip, so one cue can move three things at once.
• Snap to the grid you picked, bar, beat, 16th, or 8th.
• The readout is in bar.beat and counts your song's meter, so a 6/8 song gives you six beats to a bar and 1.4 means the fourth beat of bar one. It gets finer as the grid gets smaller.

Click the line to add a point · drag to move · option-drag a segment to curve it

Settings

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

Cues: the guide family, the Cue Library, Build Test Set and the detection engine, in one card

Ableton User Library

Where the shared sound library lives, detected from Ableton's own preferences. Choose… directs it at a library kept somewhere else, Show opens it, and Use Auto-Detected goes back to what Ableton says.

Your Ableton User Library, detected from Ableton's own preferences

Cues

• Family, the voice. Cues resolve strictly within it.
• Cue Library…, every cue a song can say, with the recording that says it, where it comes from (Stock or Yours), and the ones with nothing recorded. Listen, add your own recording, or play a different one. Yours always plays instead of a stock recording of the same phrase, and stock recordings are never overwritten. The Songs in Another Family tab lines another family's cues up against this one.
• 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.
• AbleSet Cues mode on or off, and the AbleSet Cues voice: its own generated voice, or this family's recordings. Section 15 covers what changes when you turn it on.
• Import Family…, a folder or zip of recordings, a MultiTracks Click and Guide Samples pack (its clicks come along too), or a rack of your own (Section 03). It only ever adds: nothing you have is replaced. And the guide's output, Ext. Out 7 by default.

From a Drum Rack…, in the Import Family… menu, brings a guide rack in as a family of its own. This whole row, the Cue Library and the importer are the same in StitchAble, and both apps read the same files under StitchCore in your User Library, so a family set up here is there when you build a set.

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, and the click's output is here too, Ext. Out 3 by default. A pad you haven't touched says Classic, and Classic (default) at the top of its sound menu puts it back. It's the same row in StitchAble, on the same setting.

Click: a sound and a pitch per pad, and the folder for your own

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. The section says what actually travels into each project: the spoken cues in the chosen family's voice, canvases, custom styles and scripting, each able to come from a folder of its own.

Settings, under Scripting, is off until you tick it. Then Choose… picks which of AbleSet's own settings files come along: your OSC connections and their On Create commands, your project settings and password, your device views, your MIDI mappings. The files that only work on the Mac that wrote them say this Mac only. With nothing ticked in Choose…, every file comes. What never comes is AbleSet's file cache, its setlists, your backup files, and the shared variables your script saved at your last show, so a new song starts clean, transpose 0 and all, and your canvases set them again on the first press.

AbleSet: the template folder and what travels into each project

Song titles

What each song's title locator says after its name, which is what AbleSet shows with the song: Artist, Key, BPM and Time signature, each a switch, with a preview on top. Artist and Key start on. With everything off the title keeps an empty {}, so StitchAble still knows it's a title and not a section. If the StitchAble on your Mac is older than 1.4.0, the box warns you before you turn Key off or BPM or Time on, since that StitchAble can't read those titles yet. Song name lane matches the title, on by default, keeps the SONG TITLE lane's name the same as the title locator, #tags included or left out.

Previews

Leave out of previews is the list of words that keep a track out of the editor's band mix and the waveforms: a track whose name has any of them in it isn't heard there. It starts with click, guide. Add count in or cues if your downloads carry those as stems, and Reset to default puts it back. It never changes what gets built.

Preview Cache

The band mixes the editor plays are rendered once and kept, as Apple Lossless, about 40 MB a song. This section shows what the cache holds, a size budget with a warning at 80%, a per-song breakdown that names what is using the space and what belongs to no song any more, and Reclaim, labelled with exactly what it will free. Render all now renders every song's mix ahead of time, one at a time in the background, so no first open pays for it.

Preview Cache: what it holds, the budget, and Reclaim

Artist initials

A song folder is named <Title> - <Artist initials>, the first letter of each word of the artist. An artist whose name is already an initialism breaks that rule, SEU Worship is a university and reads SEU, not SW, so this is where you force it, with what the rule would otherwise say shown beside it. Stored in your User Library under StitchCore, not in this app's preferences: it is your own list, not a shipped default.

Artist initials: your overrides, with what the rule would say beside each

Add-ons

The outside tools the apps can hand work to. AbleSet is on by default: an arrangement's skips, loops and click loops ride on its flags. Off, the switch and the blue markers and the loop buttons leave the arrangement editor, and a dropped section is simply cut. Ableton Extensions is listed but not available yet, since its SDK can't move time.

Add-ons: AbleSet on, Ableton Extensions waiting on its SDK

OSC Commands

What the / autofill offers you on a custom OSC lane: the built-in AbleSet commands, plus whatever you add here.

Add a documentation page, press Refresh, and the commands on it become autofill

• Add source takes the address of a documentation page, then Refresh reads the OSC paths off it.
• What it finds is cached, so the autofill still works with no internet.
• The panel tells you how many commands you have to hand, and Clear scraped throws the scraped ones away without touching the built-in list.

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, they get their own tracks at the top of the group.

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 14).
• Lyrics and Numbers text lanes, if you added them.
• Your own control lanes, OSC and MIDI, as real clips with their CC envelopes drawn in (Section 21).
• The stems, one track each, grouped, [noshift] where tagged, sending to the returns you set.

In Cues mode the guide layer is built differently: the template's +GUIDE track stays and hosts the AbleSet Cues plugin, there's no drum-rack guide and no +LOOPGUIDE, and your performance cues come out as a /cues/say lane.

The output folder

A self-contained song folder, in a shape BuildAble decides rather than one you have to maintain. Move it, back it up, hand it to someone, it works.

A new song is one folder, with everything inside it. Songs built before 1.3.3 have a Build My Life - P Project folder inside that one, and the .als, _MultiTracks and the rest sit in it. They still open, BuildAble and StitchAble read both, and rebuilding one writes it where it already is, so sets built from it still find their files. Songs built before 1.2.0 have _MultiTracks one level up, beside the project folder. Those open too.

Why it's shaped this way, and why that's the point

None of this is a house style. BuildAble converts into one format on purpose, and it holds you to parts of it, because every step after this one reads the format rather than guessing at your song. Doing that work up front is what makes the rest of it easy.

Inside the song's 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.

What lands in your output folder

The Song Library

Everything up to here is about making a song. This is about the sixty you've already made. Load a folder of finished sessions and manage the whole set from one window.

Browse and inspect

Direct it at a folder of built .als sessions and each song comes up as a card showing its sections, its guide cues, which click pads are live, the guide and click families it was built with, and the state of its lanes. You see what a song is without opening Ableton.

That's read from a cached .stitchcore.json sidecar sitting next to each song rather than by parsing every session, so a big library opens in about the time it takes to look at it. A song in its own folder, which is every song BuildAble builds, keeps that card beside its .als. A loose .als or a raw MultiTracks download keeps it under StitchCore/Cards in your User Library instead, so neither app drops a file into a folder that isn't its own.

Opening a song from here is immediate. The window comes up on the click with a loading screen while the session is read out of the way, then reveals ready to play, rather than sitting frozen on the click while a multi-megabyte session is read. Waveform peaks are scanned once and kept, so the second time you open a song there's nothing to scan at all.

Every finished song in one place, its arrangement pinned and its detail a click away

Cues here all show green. Everything in the Library is finalized, so there's nothing left to be uncertain about the way there is while you're still building a song.

• The arrangement map draws clip length, so a control-lane clip is a block you can read the length of rather than a bare tick.
• Lyric lanes sit directly above the song tracks, just under your custom control lanes, the same place every time.
• It opens straight away. The map's lanes are cached in the song card rather than read back out of the .als each time you look.

The detail view

Open a song's card and the arrangement stays pinned at the top while you page through the rest: sections and cues, the Tracks tab, and lyric lanes that collapse when you're not looking at them. You're reading the built song, not a summary of it.

Open and edit

Open any song straight back into the editor, change what needs changing, and press Apply changes. The edit goes into the .als itself: sections, guide and loop-guide cues, your custom lanes, and lyric timing all write back.

You can also mute, color and rename tracks and re-route returns on a song you already built, right from the Tracks tab in the detail view, without converting it again. A stem that landed on the wrong return, or a track that came in with a name you don't want to see on stage, is a fix in place rather than a rebuild. It writes back through the same routing path the converter uses, so you end up with the session you would have got if you'd set it that way to begin with. The song's own click and guide rows work here too: uncheck one and its track comes out of the session, check it and it comes back from the file in _MultiTracks.

Make consistent

Libraries drift. You change a family, reorder a rack, move a click sound, and songs built before that are quietly built differently to songs built after. Make consistent finds it and fixes it across the whole library at once.

Status is split into chips per song, guide layout on one and cues on the other, so a song with a clean layout and one odd cue reads as exactly that. Mark as same teaches it that two cue names mean the same thing, and it remembers that across every song in the library.

Arrangements

Open a finished song's card and Arrangements lays its sections out over its own waveform, one card per section. Drop one, repeat one, drag them into a new order, trim bars off either end, give a section a count-in that replays the song's own, or rename what the guide calls it, from the phrases this song's guide can actually say, so the spoken cue always agrees with the timeline. A loop button sets an AbleSet +LOOP or +LOOP:N on a section.

Name it and save it and it lives on the song. This never changes the song. An arrangement is built on a song, not into it: pick it in StitchAble and the set is built that way, with the same editor on the running-order row. There is nothing here to hear or to open in Ableton, and the sheet says so.

StitchAble really builds everything in an arrangement: a reorder moves the audio, and a round marker on each seam sets that seam's crossfade in beats, before and after. AbleSet, the switch above the timeline, hands this arrangement's skips and loops to AbleSet, and it's saved with the arrangement. Off, a dropped section is really cut and the cards have no loop button. On, a dropped section stays in the set with +SKIP on it, the guide announces what actually comes next, and it can be brought back live; a kept skip gets a round marker of its own on the section after it, for the fades around AbleSet's jump. Click loop, at the bottom of the list the + opens, adds a bar of click and tempo with no tracks under it, holding on +LOOP, at the tempo of the bar before it or one you set from its menu. Both belong to the AbleSet add-on, in Settings ▸ Add-ons.

A song's own voice

A finished song keeps the guide family it was built with instead of following the Settings default, so a Spanish song's VERSO 1 and PRE CORO read as real section types in their own colours. Give it another family from the Library or the Sections tab and the song is re-voiced: every label is read back through the family it was written in and written out in the new one, sections included. Nothing is re-detected, so hand-placed and hand-corrected cues survive. Every cue menu shows its cues spelled the chosen family's way, and still offers the ones the family has no recording for: in AbleSet Cues mode, AbleSet's own voice says those.

The guide strip says how many of the song's cues its own guide backs up, and each cue's tooltip says whether the guide speaks it. Served off the card, so it costs nothing to look.

The guide strip under the waveform, and a cue's tooltip: the song's own guide confirms PRE-CHORUS

Library Options

The options button opens the panel for the whole library. The three switches are for songs whose guide is the AbleSet Cues plugin, Disable section cues for AbleSet Cues plugin (match it to the plugin's own Count-In Sections During Playback setting), Include Loop Guide and Include Jump Guide, and Apply writes the current Cues settings and palette to every AbleSet Cues song at once. Under them, the library-wide actions: Cue Palette… for the section palette, Convert all to drum-rack guide… to take a Cues library back the other way, Make all consistent (Section 25 above), Learn every voice in this library… (next), and Restore originals from backup…, which puts every song back to the .als.bak its last apply left beside it.

Learn every voice in this library

In the Library's options, Learn every voice in this library… teaches BuildAble the voices your songs already speak. It says exactly what will and will not change before it starts, shows its progress, and sums up when it finishes, then refreshes only the cards of the songs that taught it something. For a library in a voice the bundled pack does not know, this is the one-click path; the common older MultiTracks voices are already covered.

Library Options: the guide toggles, the Cue Palette and the library-wide actions

It says what will and will not change before it starts

Housekeeping from the right-click

• Update Song Card checks first, shows what would change, and only writes if you say so.
• Rename opens a sheet showing every folder, file and sample reference that would move, and waits.
• Delete Song measures the folder, shows the size, and moves it to the Trash.

Right-click a song for its housekeeping

Rename shows what would move and waits. Nothing to change here.

A song whose folder name disagrees with what it plays, a different tempo or meter, is flagged in the Library and in the editor. Fix it in Ableton; BuildAble will not change a song's tempo or meter. The Library warning can be dismissed, the editor's cannot, and a dismissal only covers the mismatch it was dismissed for.

The Live 12 lock

A song saved by an older Ableton is flagged on its card and blocked from editing until you open it in Live 12 and re-save it. The version is read from the .als and logged on the card, so you can see which songs need it. It's a deliberate stop: writing Live 12 structures into an older session is how a mixed library breaks quietly, and quietly is the worst way for it to break.

Staying up to date

BuildAble 12 updates itself. You don't have to come back to the site to find out something changed.

• A version badge sits next to the title. Click it to check right now, or use BuildAble 12 ▸ Check for Updates… in the menu.
• It also checks on its own, a few seconds after launch and again every hour, and tells you when there's something there. You don't have to remember to look.
• Updates are signed, and they install once you approve them. Nothing installs behind your back.

Troubleshooting

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