Would you guys want to try out some pre alpha software built for exactly the use case of working remotely with collaborators on an ableton project?

The project is called kolab, it grew out of the practical issue of composing and producing music remotely. A few years ago when I lived in London I had a band project with a mate, but after I moved home to sweden we wanted to continue and the only way we get it work reliably was to use git lfs with some jiggerypokering where each of us had a similar studio setup. We have made over 200 ableton projects with the workflow so we have a sense of what works or not.

During the last year we have developed a system that is essentially an MVP, but we would welcome some people to test it in anger. Obviously its early days but we have spent the bulk of time making sure we have transactional semantics.

It works through reading an als (its a gzipped xml file), extract the referenced assets and storing their contents under hash-based identifiers on cloudflare buckets and we then use the cloudflare Artifacts for als versioning.

We do have a workflow we use manually for branching and merging that we have on the roadmap to implement as a feature but we are not there yet.

When it comes to the ethics about dealing with the data, we both believe that when we go live we would prefer end to end encryption, but need to think about recoverability. One thing is very clear. We rather close the whole project than to let data be used for example for model training.

We plan to have a free tier, but the idea is a small monthly subscription depending on usage. Currently we only support mac, but we do have windows support planned. What we have tested is the latest Ableton 12 version, but as you may know Ableton refuses to open projects saved in a never version. As a response for that we have experimental support of pushing a project as an Ableton 10 version.

I also want to mention that the software is in the stage of yeah it works, but needs much more testing before we could bump it to beta. So bear in mind there will be bugs.

If you are interested, please email: info at kolibrinkpg.com