Ableton Live Timeline Viewer#

A real-time visual timeline viewer for Ableton Live projects that parses XML files and displays live playback in the terminal.

Quick Start#

One-command pipeline:

cd reference
npm run timeline

This will automatically:

1. Find your zzzZWAP_extracted.xml file
2. Parse the Ableton project data
3. Start a live, real-time visual timeline in your terminal

Features#

• Live Timeline Visualization: See your project play in real-time with beat-accurate timing
• Track Activity Display: Visual representation of which tracks are active
• Note Stream: Rolling display of recent MIDI notes with pitch information
• Progress Bar: Visual progress through your song
• Interactive Controls:
  • SPACE = Play/Pause
  • Q = Quit

How It Works#

1. XML Parsing: Uses a SAX parser to efficiently extract timeline data from Ableton's XML format
2. Data Processing: Organizes tracks, clips, MIDI notes, and timing information
3. Real-time Playback: Simulates playback using the project's tempo and timing
4. Terminal Visualization: Updates the display at 30fps for smooth animation

What You'll See#

🎵 Ableton Live Timeline Viewer
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
▶️  00:16.2 | Tempo: 120 BPM | Beat: 33.04
Progress: ██░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 6.2%
Active Notes: 2

Track Activity:
Track Name   │ Recent Notes
───────────────────────────────────
LOW          │                     
3 BASS       │ C2 F2               
8 TREM FX    │                     
9 FX 1       │                     
11 RATTLE HA │ C5 C5 C5            
A-Reverb     │                     
B-Delay      │                     

Recent Notes:
C5 C5 C5 C5 F2 C2

Controls: SPACE = play/pause, Q = quit

Files#

• ableton-live-viewer.mjs - Main viewer application
• timeline.mjs - Simple launcher script
• package.json - Updated with npm run timeline command

Manual Usage#

You can also run the viewer directly with a specific XML file:

node ableton-live-viewer.mjs /path/to/your/extracted.xml

Requirements#

• Node.js
• saxes package for XML parsing
• chalk package for colored terminal output

Dependencies are already installed in the reference directory.