Notation

Render MIDI clips in Ableton Live as sheet music notation.

Right-click a clip, clip slot, scene, track, or arrangement selection and pick a "Render…" action. A modal dialog opens showing the notation, with a toolbar for quantization, time signature, and export.

Context menu actions

Right-click on…	Action	What it does
Clip slot selection (Session)	Render Clip(s)	Each selected clip on its own staff in a score. Right-clicking a single clip slot counts as a selection of one.
Scene	Render Scene	All MIDI clips in that scene row, one staff per track.
MIDI track	Render Track (Session)	All clip slots on the track flattened onto one staff; empty slots become bar rests.
MIDI track	Render Track (Arrangement)	All arrangement clips on the track flattened onto one staff, aligned to the bar grid; gaps become rest measures.
Arrangement time selection	Render Clip(s)	MIDI clips that overlap the selected range, each on its own staff.
Arrangement time selection	Render Range	The selected time range flattened onto one staff per track.

Session View and Arrangement View are exposed as separate "Render Track" items because the SDK does not currently report which view the user right-clicked from.

Toolbar

• Quantization — 16th, 16th triplet, 32nd. Notes snap to the chosen grid before being notated.
• Time signature — defaults to the first scene's time signature (or 4/4 if unavailable). Adjustable in the dialog.
• Legato — extends note durations to fill the gap to the next note so phrases read as connected.
• Tempo — toggle a tempo marking at the top of the score.
• Drum heads — render clips on drum tracks with x noteheads. A track counts as a drum track if it contains a Drum Rack at any depth (including nested inside an Instrument Rack), or its name suggests drums ("drums"/"kit"). Toggleable in the dialog.
• Sort — Pitch (treble above bass, then high to low), Track (track order), Native (preserve selection order).
• View — toggle between rendered notation and the raw MusicXML source.
• Export — SVG, PNG, or MusicXML. Files are written to a temp directory and opened with the system default application.

Installation

1. Enable Developer Mode in Live's Extensions settings.
2. Extract the extension zip into Live's extensions folder (or run npm run dev -- notation-extension from the SDK repo root during development).
3. Restart Live. The "Render…" actions appear in the relevant right-click menus.

Known limitations

• Export flow — the embedded webview (WKWebView / WebView2) does not support download attributes or navigator.clipboard. Exports go through the extension host: files land in a temp directory and open in your system's default viewer. Cmd+C inside the dialog does not copy the notation.
• Time signature — sourced from the first scene's signature. Mid-song signature changes are not followed; the displayed signature is a single value and is adjustable in the toolbar.
• Clip end — the alpha SDK reports clip.endMarker at the absolute clip end rather than the playback end, so the renderer uses clip.loopEnd as the effective end regardless of whether the clip is looping.
• One-way dialog — the dialog is opened with the clip data and returns a single result on close. Changes made to clips in Live while the dialog is open are not reflected; close and re-open to refresh.
• Range selections drop leading sustained notes — when you right-click an arrangement time selection and choose "Render Range", notes whose onset falls before the selection start are dropped entirely, even if they sustain into the range. Nudge the selection onto the phrase start to include them.

Dependencies

Notation rendering is provided by OpenSheetMusicDisplay. A few npm audit advisories surface against tar/node-gyp/gl, all pulled in as optional transitive build dependencies of OSMD. They are not bundled into the shipped extension.

License

The extension is MIT-licensed — see LICENSE. It bundles third-party libraries (preact, opensheetmusicdisplay, and its transitive dependencies vexflow, jszip, loglevel, typescript-collections); their notices are in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.