TaGiT

An Ableton Live Extension that right-click-tags a clip (or a whole track at once) with a role — sets both the clip's color and name prefix in one click, e.g. Groove 1 → [BASS] Groove 1, instead of the usual color-picker-then-rename dance.

(Formerly "Clip Role Tagger" — renamed to keep Live's auto-grouped menu heading short; the repo slug is unchanged. See CHANGELOG.md.)

See DEVLOG.md for how this was actually built — including a process-killing crash, a native-picker glitch, and a license catch made before anything went public. See CHANGELOG.md for what shipped when.

Install

Download the latest .ablx from Releases, then drag it into Live → Settings → Extensions. Requires Ableton Live 12 Beta (12.4.5+) with Extensions support.

Menu actions

Live groups each extension's items under its own name automatically, so these show up in the right-click menu under a "TaGiT" heading:

• Right-click a clip (Session or Arrangement view) → "<role>" (e.g. "TaGiT: Bass") — tags just that clip.
• Right-click a track header → "<role> (Track)" (e.g. "TaGiT: Bass (Track)") — tags every clip on the track, Session and Arrangement view both, as one undoable step (Cmd+Z undoes the whole batch, not clip-by-clip).
• Right-click a clip → "Clear" — strips the [TAG] prefix back off. Color is left as-is; there's no "no color" clip state to revert to.
• Right-click a track header → "Clear (Track)" — same, for every clip on the track, as one undoable step.
• Right-click a track header → "Configure…" — opens a settings dialog to add, edit, recolor, or remove roles. Changes apply immediately, no restart needed. Includes Export/Import (copy-paste JSON, no native file dialog) for moving a role set between machines or sharing one with someone else.

Re-tagging a clip replaces the old tag rather than stacking it. Roles ship with six defaults (Drums/Bass/Lead/Pad/FX/Vocal) but are fully customizable through the settings dialog — see roles.example.json for the underlying schema if you want to hand-edit the config file directly instead.

Building from source

This repo does not include the Ableton Extensions SDK itself — its license prohibits redistributing it outside of a compiled application, so you need your own copy:

1. Join Ableton's Beta Program and download the Extensions SDK zip from Centercode.
2. Copy ableton-extensions-sdk-1.0.0-beta.1.tgz and ableton-extensions-cli-1.0.0-beta.1.tgz from that zip into a vendor/ folder here (create it — it's gitignored).
3. npm install
4. npm start — builds and launches the Extension Host against EXTENSION_HOST_PATH in .env (create this too, e.g. EXTENSION_HOST_PATH=/Applications/Ableton Live 12 Beta.app). Requires Developer Mode enabled in Live → Settings → Extensions.
5. npm run package — production build + .ablx archive.

Development

The extraction described in DEVLOG.md v3/v3.1 pulled the two invariants behind those bugs — never re-register a command slot, always register a new context-menu set before tearing down the old one — out of extension.ts into standalone modules (src/registration.ts, src/tag-format.ts) that don't import @ableton-extensions/sdk at all. That's what makes the commands below possible without the (unredistributable, beta-gated) SDK installed:

• npm test — unit tests (Node's built-in node:test, run via tsx; no separate test-runner dependency), including regression tests named after those two incidents.
• npm run lint — Biome, lint + format check. npm run lint:fix applies safe fixes.
• npm run ci — everything CI runs: lint, a typecheck scoped to the SDK-free modules (tsconfig.ci.json), tests, and the package.json/manifest.json version-consistency check.

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs npm run ci on every push and PR — but, for the same SDK-redistribution reason vendor/ is gitignored, it can't install @ableton-extensions/sdk and so can't typecheck extension.ts itself or produce a .ablx. That part only a full local build (above), by someone with their own SDK copy, can verify.

Known limitations

• This is a beta-SDK project. Ableton's Extensions SDK is itself in public beta; behavior may change under future SDK versions.

License

MIT for the code in this repository — see LICENSE. Built against Ableton's Extensions SDK, which is separately licensed by Ableton AG and not redistributed here.