Isotonik Studios eraserMice ProSession Toolkit review

The successor to eraserMice's collection of floating mixing tools for Ableton Live, ProSession Toolkit combines all previous gadgets in a trio of Max For Live devices aimed at enhancing the accessibility of Live's mixer and device controls.

The headline act is ProSession, which is best loaded onto Live's Master bus, where it appears in the Device View as a horizontally resizable miniature Session View.

Not only does this bring clip and Scene launching to the Arrange View, Bitwig-style, but it also includes its own level, pan and send controls, invoked by clicking the track headers, and the parameters of all devices on each track via modifier keys (and settings made in ProSession HUDD - see below). These can be shown as regular faders or combined in (predefined) pairs in an X/Y controller.

The second device, ProSession HUDD, acts like a linked (or not) 'detail' view, letting you quickly get to every parameter of every device on the currently selected (or not) track in the main ProSession. You bank up and down through groups of eight controls at a time with the Up and Dn buttons, and select tracks and devices using the two menus at the top.

The third device is ProSession HUDD Remote, which enables MIDI and OSC mapping to the sliders and other controls of ProSession HUDD.

Ultimately, ProSession Toolkit is all about improving workflow and the ability to launch clips in the Arrange View, and it succeeds in both of these areas, making it possible to control an entire Live Session from a single track's Device View. ProSession itself couldn't be easier to use, and the HUDD works as well as the space it occupies allows - it can be locked to a specific device on each track, and you can rack up multiple instances of it, too, of course.

While there's a lot of stuff here that never quite feels totally essential, since accessing devices and mixer controls in Live is pretty effortless anyway, just having the Clip launcher in the Device Rack makes ProSession Toolkit worth every penny to any Live user, particularly those working on laptops and smaller displays.