Setting it up is quite similar to TweakyBeat – tap on the ‘gear’ icon at the top right of the main Gadget page to see the Settings menu. And of course, back to the point, Gadget does Link as well. The only shortcoming as such is that it – understandably – has to flatten all of your programmed MIDI parts into audio clips and scenes to ensure Live can open them properly. Very cool (Novation’s Blocs Wave app can also do this). It also has the ability to export songs as either MIDI files, or more relevantly, as Ableton Live projects. It has great synths, drum machines, and samplers. Gadget is a pay app, with in-app purchases to add extra instruments. My other favourite is Korg’s Gadget, which is the closest thing to Live on iOS – if you see Live as a programming/MIDI/synth environment, with scenes for launching different sections. You then see the Ableton Link page, where you can turn Link itself on and off, and choose to receive in-app notifications when other apps join or leave the session. To configure TweakyBeat for Link, tap the little ‘i’ at the bottom right of the screen, then ‘Link and MIDI’ at the top on the next page that appears, then tap the red words ‘Ableton Link’. There are many Link-enabled music apps available, although I have two favourites: the first being TweakyBeat, a fantastic bleepy beat-making app that never fails to make great sounds, and has the advantage of being free if you haven’t got that already, get it now! And failing all else, thanks to good old MIDI, any hardware or software that understands MIDI can also be included. There are currently a handful of Link apps for Android, but I’m sure that number will increase I’ve also seen people experimenting with Link on the Raspberry Pi platform. Make no mistake, though, Link is cross-platform, just like Live itself, so it’ll work on Windows, and between Mac and Windows machines. In the walkthrough steps here, I’m talking about Live, of course, which I’m running on macOS Sierra, then about iOS devices and apps. The setup doesn’t even have to include Live, or any computer at all: Link works perfectly well between iOS devices. Outside the computer (and Link is cross-platform), Link is also available for iOS and Android developers (DAW developers too, it’s already made it to Reason and Serato DJ), so suddenly we can include iPhones and iPads into our setups, in a reasonably seamless fashion. This is a method of synchronisation that’s built into Ableton Live 9, and works over a Wi-Fi network or an ethernet cable. Traditionally, we’ve had methods for dealing with this, such as ReWire and MIDI Sync, but on days where we don’t want to carry too many interfaces and cables with us, but we still want to sync tightly, we need a clean solution, and that’s where Ableton Link comes in.
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