LiveImproved is a system-level extension for Ableton Live focused on real keyboard usability and efficient plugin selection, including a configurable double-right-click plugin menu.

It fixes long-standing focus and window management issues, enables deterministic keyboard shortcuts and macros, and provides a fast, format-aware plugin launcher — all without relying on UI scripting or timing hacks.

LiveImproved is designed to eliminate the need for wrapper racks, duplicated plugins, or naming conventions to enable fast plugin access.

Why?

Ableton Live is extremely powerful, but it provides no keyboard-based window switching for plugin windows and offers no way to customize keyboard actions.

These issues have been among the most-requested features on Ableton’s feature request forum for over a decade.

LiveImproved implements reliable focus, window management, and deterministic keyboard control at the system level.

What LiveImproved enables

• True keyboard-driven workflows
  • Reliable focus and z-ordering for plugin windows
  • Keyboard cycling and closing (cmd+`, cmd+w) without mouse interaction
• Deterministic actions
  • Custom shortcuts and macros that don’t depend on UI state
  • Automatically disabled while typing in text fields
• Designed with latency as the primary constraint
• Fast, intentional plugin access
  • Fuzzy-searchable plugin launcher
  • Customizable format priority (e.g. VST3 → AU → VST)
  • Direct plugin loading via IPC → custom MIDI Remote Script, not browser navigation
• Optional window orchestration
  • Open / close all plugins on a track
  • Tile plugin windows when needed
• Context-aware double-right-click plugin menu

Example configuration

LiveImproved is configured via YAML.

Configuration is split into a keyboard/action config and a double-right-click menu config.

remap:
  cmd+w: closeFocusedPlugin
  cmd+shift+w: closeAllPlugins
  d: delete
  cmd+i: cmd+a, plugin.Serum
  cmd+b: cmd+d, cmd+d, cmd+d, cmd+d

See the example action config and example context menu config for more details.

Migration from Live Enhancement Suite (LES)

LiveImproved includes tooling to import existing LES plugin menu configurations, allowing users to transition without rebuilding their workflows.

Project status

• Actively used by the author
• Proven stable on macOS (Intel & Apple Silicon)
• Windows port in progress

Platform support

• macOS (Intel)
• macOS (Apple Silicon)
• Windows
  • IPC
  • Keyboard hooking
  • Accessibility / UI integration
  • Plugin window ordering & z-order management

Building

# macOS:
brew install harfbuzz
brew install yaml-cpp
git submodule update --init --recursive
make configure
make configure-xcode
make build-xcode
# copy the contents of ./remote_scripts to <Ableton MIDI Remote Scripts>/LiveImproved
# or,
# cd <Ableton MIDI Remote Scripts> && git clone git@github.com:ChasonDeshotel/LiveImproved-RemoteScript.git LiveImproved

Contributing

Contributions are welcome.

Remaining work is concentrated in the Live window management layer on Windows (focus, z-ordering, and plugin window enumeration).