Yoink ♡

A web-audio → Ableton Live sampler, built on the Ableton Extensions SDK (public beta). Right-click an audio track, paste a link from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, SoundCloud, or anywhere else yt-dlp supports, trim the exact section you want on a waveform, and it drops into your Set as a WAV — ready to chop. No bouncing out to a browser, a downloader, and a file manager mid-session.

Wrapped in a Y2K / Windows-2000 "MS Paint" aesthetic, because a sampling utility doesn't have to look like a settings panel.

Download

⬇️ Download the latest .ablx — then double-click the file and Ableton Live installs the extension. Right-click any audio track → Open Yoink ♡.

What it does

• Paste any link — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, SoundCloud, and more (anything yt-dlp supports). The platform is auto-detected from the URL.
• Fetches the video's title, channel, and audio.
• Waveform trim — drag the in/out handles, scroll to zoom, drag to pan, hit play to scrub and preview the selection before committing.
• Drops the trimmed WAV into the Arrangement on the selected (or a new) track, named from the video title, at your chosen sample rate.
• Cleans up after itself — every run works in its own temp folder, which is deleted when it finishes, is cancelled, or fails.
• Skins — switch between Luna (XP blue), Dolphin (pink & sky blue) and Plumbob (Media Player lime) from the Skin menu; your pick is remembered.
• Light on memory — the track is stream-decoded once into compact waveform peaks plus a 90-second window for BPM/key detection, so memory stays small whatever the length. Links are capped at 60 minutes because the audio preview is inlined into the trim window.

How it works

The host (Node, via the Extensions SDK) registers an AudioTrack context-menu action and orchestrates a small sequence of dialogs:

1. Paste window → returns the URL.
2. Progress dialog while yt-dlp downloads the audio; ffmpeg renders a compact preview and, in parallel, stream-decodes the track into waveform peaks + a BPM/key analysis window.
3. Trim window — an HTML dialog with the preview and peaks inlined as base64; the waveform is drawn from the peaks, so the dialog never decodes the full track.
4. On confirm, ffmpeg trims to a WAV at the chosen sample rate, the SDK imports it into the project, and a clip is created on the track.

Tech

• TypeScript + Node on the Ableton Extensions SDK (@ableton-extensions/sdk, 1.0.0 beta)
• yt-dlp + ffmpeg for fetching / trimming / converting audio
• Canvas waveform from host-computed peaks (zoom/pan), <audio> for the looping preview
• esbuild to bundle the extension (with HTML inlined as text)
• Node's built-in test runner for the pure logic (URL parsing, peak streaming, BPM/key detection, filename sanitization, ffmpeg arg building)

Prerequisites

yt-dlp and ffmpeg must be installed and on your PATH:

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

Setup

npm install
cp .env.example .env   # then set EXTENSION_HOST_PATH for your machine

EXTENSION_HOST_PATH points at Ableton Live's Extension Host module (ExtensionHostNodeModule.node).

Scripts

npm start          # build (dev) + run in Live's Extension Host
npm test           # run unit tests
npm run build      # production bundle
npm run package    # build + create a .ablx archive

Limitations & SDK feedback

Notes from building on the beta SDK — hopefully useful feedback, and context for the design choices here:

• Modal dialogs are single-shot. A dialog returns one value when it closes (close_and_send); there's no persistent host↔dialog channel. So the waveform/preview can't be fed to an already-open dialog — the audio has to be inlined into the dialog up front, and the flow is split across separate windows.
• Inline event handlers are blocked by the dialog's content-security policy. onclick="…" silently does nothing; buttons must be wired with addEventListener.
• No Set sample-rate getter, so the output rate can't be auto-matched — the user picks 44.1 / 48 kHz instead.
• No playhead / insert-position API, so imported clips land at bar 1 of the Arrangement.
• Embedded host runtime gotchas: the URL global isn't reliably available (URLs are parsed by hand), and a GUI-spawned host inherits a minimal PATH (external tools are resolved to absolute paths).

Notes

This downloads audio from YouTube, which is subject to YouTube's Terms of Service and to copyright. Intended for personal sampling use.