Clip Role Tagger

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.

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.

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

• Right-click a clip (Session or Arrangement view) → "Clip Role Tagger: Tag as: <role>" — tags just that clip.
• Right-click a track header → "Clip Role Tagger: Tag all clips as: <role>" — 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 track header → "Configure Clip Role Tagger…" — opens a settings dialog to add, edit, recolor, or remove roles. Changes apply immediately, no restart needed.

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.

Known limitations

• The Extensions SDK beta has no context-menu grouping/submenu API. Every installed extension's menu items land in the same flat right-click menu — this extension's items are prefixed "Clip Role Tagger: ..." so they stay identifiable once you have more than one extension installed.
• Clip color encoding is unverified. Clip.color is a packed 0xRRGGBB integer, following the convention from Live's older Python Control Surface API — the beta SDK docs just say number without specifying the encoding.
• 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.