For anyone who spends a lot of their time working with music software, workflow is everything. A simple hack that saves a few seconds by making an oft-repeated action quicker can eventually add up to hundreds of hours saved. Making the production process feel smoother and more efficient, this helps us stay in our creative flow.
That's exactly what the Live Enhancement Suite was designed for. This free tool does exactly what it says on the tin, enhancing Ableton Live with a number of shortcuts and tweaks so useful that, once they become part of your workflow, you won't believe you got by without them.
By far the most time-saving of these is the ability to quickly add devices from a customizable menu. Just double right-click in Live's bottom panel, where instruments and effects for each track are loaded, and you'll open up a menu (pictured above) that contains a list of plugins to be dropped in with one click.
Gone are the days of menu-diving in the browser or typing out a plugin's name in the search bar every time you need it. You can add your most frequently used devices to this menu and load them up almost instantly. This makes loading up complex effects chains or instrument racks about ten times quicker.
That alone would make Live Enhancement Suite worth a download, but there's more. The app adds several handy shortcuts to Live's arsenal that make it much quicker to do things like closing all plugin windows at once, clearing tracks, placing locators, drawing notes and saving alternate versions of a project.
Live Enhancement Suite also gives you the option to double right-click the piano roll to quickly apply a scale, making it easy to see if your melodies are in key. You can also open up a timer that tells you how long you've been working on your project, an FL Studio feature Live users have been after for a while; this can be customized to tell you how long you've been in Live or how long Live has been open.
Live Enhancement Suite is available for Windows and macOS. Head over to their website to download or watch a tutorial video below.
